FILM OF THE WEEK

The Third Man (1949) 2.15pm, Saturday, BBC Two

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Carol Reed’s sublime postwar thriller pipped both Brief Encounter (1945) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to the top spot when the British Film Institute conducted a major poll to nd the Greatest British Films of all time. And it’s not di cult to see why. Penned by Grahame Greene with the director (and a little help from Orson Welles), The Third Man is the story of an American pulp writer (Joseph Cotten) who travels to postwar Vienna in the hope of meeting up with his old friend (Orson Welles). All he encounters, however, is news of his friend’s apparent death and a shadowy city mired in racketeering, betrayal and deceit.

Though Reed was behind the camera, it’s clear that the director collaborated strongly with Orson Welles, because the hand of the Citizen Kane director is all over this lm, notably in the noirish photography and obtuse choice of camera angles. The cast is rst-rate ( Trevor Howard and Alida Valli are in support) but it’s the crew who shine on this lm – Robert Krasker’s Oscar-winning cinematography is a treat; Anton Karras’s zither score is haunting, and the writing (as we can see from the above quote) is razor sharp.

In a lm full of memorable moments, our rst sight of Orson Welles, accidentally illuminated in a doorway, is particularly striking. ‘’It’s one of the great epiphanies in movies,’’ says Third Man devotee Martin Scorsese, ‘’the cat turning the corner and nestling itself on those wing-tip shoes, and then Harry Lime being revealed when the light is turned on in the doorway and it shines in his face. That might be the best revelation – or the best reveal, as they say – in all of cinema.’’