The Third Man is a 1949 film noir directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard.

Set in post-World War II Allied-occupied Vienna, the film centres on American writer Holly Martins (Cotten), who arrives in the city to accept a job with his friend Harry Lime (Welles), only to learn that he has died.

[7] Holly Martins, an American author of Western pulp novels, arrives in the British sector of Allied-occupied Vienna seeking Harry Lime, a childhood friend who has offered him a job.

Lime speaks cynically of the insignificance of his victims' lives and the personal gains to be earned from the city's chaos and deprivation, further suggesting that he sold Anna out to the Soviet authorities in order to discourage them from pursuing him.

"[14] Rosenbaum writes that Welles "didn't direct anything in the picture; the basics of his shooting and editing style, its music and meaning, are plainly absent.

Bogdanovich also stated in the introduction to the DVD: However, I think it's important to note that the look of The Third Man—and, in fact, the whole film—would be unthinkable without Citizen Kane, The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, all of which Orson made in the '40s, and all of which preceded The Third Man.

[21] Thomas Riegler emphasises the opportunities for Cold War espionage that the Vienna locations made available, and notes that "the audio engineer Jack Davies noticed at least one mysterious person on the set.

Back on the ground, he notes: You know what the fellow said—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.

yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box!

In a 1916 reminiscence, American painter Theodore Wores said that he "tried to get an acknowledgment from Whistler that San Francisco would some day become a great art center on account of our climatic, scenic and other advantages.

Writer John McPhee pointed out that when the Borgias flourished in Italy, Switzerland had "the most powerful and feared military force in Europe" and was not the neutral country it later became.

According to Time: "The picture demanded music appropriate to post-World War II Vienna, but director Reed had made up his mind to avoid schmaltzy, heavily orchestrated waltzes.

[36] As the original British release begins, the voice of director Carol Reed (uncredited) describes post-war Vienna from a racketeer's point of view.

The version shown in American cinemas cut eleven minutes of footage[37] and replaced Reed's voice-over with narration by Cotten as Holly Martins.

[38] Today, Reed's original version appears on American DVDs, in showings on Turner Classic Movies, and in U.S. cinema releases with the eleven minutes of footage restored, including a shot of a near-topless dancer that would have violated the Hays Code.

[39] According to Kinematograph Weekly, the 'biggest winner' at the box office in 1949 Britain was The Third Man, with "runners up" being Johnny Belinda, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Paleface, Scott of the Antarctic, The Blue Lagoon, Maytime in Mayfair, Easter Parade, Red River, and I Was a Male War Bride.

The Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung, although critical of a "not-too-logical plot", praised the film's "masterful" depiction of a "time out of joint" and the city's atmosphere of "insecurity, poverty and post-war immorality".

C. A. Lejeune in The Observer described Reed's "habit of printing his scenes askew, with floors sloping at a diagonal and close-ups deliriously tilted" as "most distracting".

Reed's friend William Wyler sent him a spirit level with a note stating: "Carol, next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera, will you?

[44] Time wrote that the film was "crammed with cinematic plums that would do the early Hitchcock proud—ingenious twists and turns of plot, subtle detail, full-bodied bit characters, atmospheric backgrounds that become an intrinsic part of the story, a deft commingling of the sinister with the ludicrous, the casual with the bizarre.

"[45] The New York Times movie critic Bosley Crowther, after a prefatory qualification that the film was "designed [only] to excite and entertain", wrote that Reed "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.

"[46] A rare negative review came from the British communist newspaper Daily Worker, which complained that "no effort is spared to make the Soviet authorities as sinister and unsympathetic as possible.

"[47] Binx Bolling, the hero of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, recalls: Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments from their lives; the time they climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books.

Gene Siskel remarked that The Third Man was an "exemplary piece of moviemaking, highlighting the ruins of World War II and juxtaposing it with the characters' own damaged histories".

On 26 December 1950, the BBC Home Service broadcast a radio adaptation by Desmond Carrington, using the actual soundtrack of the film with linking narration performed by Wilfred Thomas.

[61] On 13 November 1971, as part of the Saturday Night Theatre, BBC Radio 4 broadcast an adaptation from the screenplay by Richard Wortley, with Ed Bishop as Holly Martins, Ian Hendry as Harry Lime, Ann Lynn as Anna and John Bentley as Col. Calloway,[62] In November 1994, a new dramatisation directed by Robert Robinson was performed and recorded by the L.A. Theatre Works in front of a live audience at the Guest Quarter Suite Hotel in Santa Monica, California.

Recordings of the 1952 episodes "Man of Mystery", "Murder on the Riviera", and "Blackmail Is a Nasty Word" are included on the Criterion Collection DVD The Complete Mr. Arkadin.

Harry Lime appeared in two comic book stories in the fourth issue of Super Detective Library:[64] "The Secret of the Circus" and "Too Many Crooks".

Jonathan Harris played sidekick Bradford Webster for 72 episodes, and Roger Moore guest-starred in the instalment "The Angry Young Man", which Hiller directed.