Join us at 5:20 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 5th for a free screening of Carol Reed’s cinematic masterpiece “The Third Man” (1949) on 16mm film! The event is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required.
Quoting from the New York Times 1950 review of The Third Man:
“The haunting music of a zither (a stringed musical instrument with a flat, horizontal soundboard and strings stretched across), the ring of Vienna’s cobbled streets and a ghostly Graham Greene story, about a man-hunt in that seamy capital flow smoothly and beautifully together into one piece of top screen artifice in Carol Reed’s most recent (and most touted) mystery-thriller-romance, The Third Man (1949). …The simple fact is that The Third Man, for all the awesome hoopla it has received, is essentially a first-rate contrivance in the way of melodrama—and that’s all. It isn’t a penetrating study of any European problem of the day (except that it skirts around black-markets and the sinister anomalies of ‘zones’). It doesn’t present any ‘message.’ It hasn’t a point of view. It is just a bang-up melodrama, designed to excite and entertain. …
Into this strangely off-beat story of a young American visitor’s attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery of a friend’s dubious ‘death’ in Vienna’s streets, Mr. Reed has brilliantly packaged the whole bag of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised.
His devilishly mischievous humor also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre. To be sure, Mr. Greene has contributed conspicuously to the job with a script that is cleverly constructed and pungently laced with dialogue. The smoothness and ease with which the edges of the mystery plot tongue and groove—with which the missing man’s sweetheart joins the drama, the police build the case and such as that, while all the while little bits of color and character are worked in—make for complete fascination.
Except for one far-fetched allowance for poor police-craft (a dead man is not properly identified) and a chase through the sewers for the climax (which is graphic but conventional) the script is tops. So, too, are the performances of everyone in the cast—of Joseph Cotten as the American who blunders upon mystery and romance; of Valli, the cool Italian actress, who plays the refugee girl of the ‘dead’ man; of Trevor Howard as a British police major, a beautifully crisp and seasoned gent; of Bernard Lee as his capable sergeant and of several grand continental ‘types.’ Even our old and perennially villainous friend, Orson Welles, does a right nice job of shaping a dark and treacherous shadow as the ‘third man.’
However, with all due allowance, top credit must go to Mr. Reed for molding all possible elements into a thriller of super consequence. And especially must he be credited with the brilliant and triumphant device of using the music of a zither as the sole musical background in this film. This eerie and mesmerizing music, which is rhythmic and passionate and sad, becomes, indeed, the commentator—the genius loci—of the Viennese scene. Pulsing with hopefulness and longing with ‘menace’ and poignance and love, it thoroughly completes the illusions of a swift and intriguing romance. (Bosley Crowther, New York Times, February 3, 1950)
This AV Club screening of Carol Reed’s The Third Man on 16mm film is also a class screening for International Film History and is open to the public as part of a 3-series collaboration between Dr. Terri Francis, Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts and Katharine Labuda, film archivist and special collections librarian of the Miami-Dade Public Library, Main Branch.
AV CLUB is an ongoing program of curated 16mm short film screenings and feature presentations designed to provoke discussion, create awareness of unique library resources held by the Special Collections Division of the Miami-Dade Public Library System and generate enthusiasm for learning and research.
The Miami-Dade Public Library holds one of the last remaining circulating 16mm film collections. The collection dates to 1956 and was developed to be a teaching collection designed for public programming.
