Why you need to go see classic 'The Third Man' on the big screen

Critics and fans alike have long named Carol Reed's 1949 thriller The Third Man as the best film ever produced in Britain.

Penned by the brilliant novelist Graham Greene and featuring exquisite performances by Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, and Trevor Howard, Reed's film is a genre entry like no other. A popular and populist picture beloved by pulp fiction addicts and high-art connoisseurs alike, The Third Man isn't merely a joy to watch.

A crime film idiosyncratic in every possible way, perplexing in its wide tonal range, and impossible to categorize, it's an immeasurably rich experience in pure cinematic jouissance.

The film is making the theatrical rounds once again, in a stunning new 4K restoration that opens Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse. It is restored frame by frame in high definition. The famous shadows, deep blacks, and somber grays are crisp, arresting, and breathtaking on the big screen.

At once a fast-paced, action film and a serious intellectual statement about America's role in post-WWII Europe, The Third Man also carries with it, like a thematic switchblade, an utterly mad, sharp sense of mordant humor. It's a study in contradictions.

Set in post-war Vienna, The Third Man has a true-life premise at once compelling and simple: Welles stars as Harry Lime, the head of a ruthless black-market ring that steals penicillin, waters it down, and resells it to hospitals. Their lucrative larceny already has caused dozens of deaths.

Cotten plays Lime's school chum Holly Martins, a writer of pulp westerns who flies to Vienna in hopes of working for Lime. Prototypically American in his naiveté and petulant loudness, Holly can't believe it when British military policeman Maj. Calloway (Howard) tells him his pal is a mass murderer.

Acting like the ludicrous outlaws in his novels, Holly declares, "I'm gunning for you," and storms out to clear Harry's name.

The Third Man is as dark as any film noir, a seedy yarn set on the bleak streets and cavernous sewers of a bombed-out, war-ravaged, impoverished city.

Yet the movie opens not on a shot of shadowy gun-toting men - but on a close-up of a zither. And, as the credits roll on, we're treated to a most goofy, cheerful, chirpy tune played on that strange stringed instrument.

Every time the viewer finds himself sucked into the suspenseful storyline expertly crafted by Greene (Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory), or sinking into the inky, rain-slicked nightscape spun like a spell by Robert Krasker's photography; every time we fix on costar Alida Valli's enchantingly defiant gaze, or strain to keep up with the villainous Lime's rapid, mesmerizing, Nietzschean monologues about the Borgias; every time we follow Holly down another bleak alleyway . . . every single time, that darn zither kicks in - and kicks us - repeating that same silly leitmotif.

(Famously composed and played by Anton Karas, the tune was promoted heavily by the film's co-producer, Hollywood giant David O. Selznick, who helped make it a Top 10 hit in 1950.)

The cognitive dissonance is unnerving.

What is this, a tragedy or absurdist farce?

The Third Man, of course, is both tragic and farcical.

It's a prototypical Greene yarn, with its mixture of pulpish suspense, complex characterization, and sober moral inquiry. Through Holly, the film mounts a frontal assault on what you could call the Ugly American syndrome that gripped Europe with the Marshall Plan: here they all were, bright, shiny American bureaucrats telling Europeans how to live.

Lacking entirely in historical consciousness, unaware of the deep fatalism that pervades European ways, Holly is a pragmatist who believes he can sheriff the chaos around him into perfect order.

The wound he finds at the heart of the continent can't be sutured.

Lime is another typical man from the West: the ruthless capitalist who takes over once the blood-and-soil nationalists are gone.

Yet, for all its stark realism, The Third Man reminds us the film is a fantasy. This isn't a philosophical tract or a work of art, Reed tells us through that zither, but a Selznick production, a commercial product.

Unlike Roberto Rossellini's war trilogy (Rome: Open City, Paisan, and Germany Year Zero), The Third Man doesn't show us the full horror that befell Europe's capitals. Rossellini's films are stark snapshots that capture postwar misery and poverty in the full glare of the sun.

Reed's Vienna is dark and full of murder, but it never actually shows us a single victim, a single corpse.

In one critical scene, Maj. Calloway takes Holly to a hospital where children are dying from the effects of Harry's counterfeit drugs. Not a single child is shown on camera. All we see is Holly's face as he reacts to the patients.

Reed's Vienna is incorporeal. It's a fabulists' city, a ghost city, filled with intense, disembodied faces. Everyone we meet is bundled up in coats, sweaters, blankets. Even Holly's love interest, Anna (Valli), remains fully clothed. Theirs is a romance without contact. There are no embraces. And not a single kiss, merely the desire, registered in the eyes and mouth.

The Third Man is a self-deconstructing story that takes time out to tear its own edifice down even as it works hard to build it for us.

This is hell, the state of Vienna after the war with its crime and its grime. But, heck, this is only a movie, the film says.

If you want reality, follow the exit signs.

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