The Third Man

There is no question about it: The Third Man is certainly the best British thriller ever made, and it also has a considerable claim to be The Best British Film of All Time.

A rare opportunity to see it on the big screen this evening has simply reinforced my view: this film is pure movie magic from start to finish.

Can there be anyone who has not actually seen it? The plot is simple: Holly Martins, a penniless writer of cheap cowboy novels, arrives in Vienna, a city still largely destroyed by the War and, like Berlin, in the control of the four powers, France, Britain, Russia and America. The centre is an "international zone" where all four powers jointly police it -- one car with a policeman from each nation.

Trevor Howard plays the senior British officer we encounter, a smooth bureaucrat of the old school who's world-weary but still driven to do the right thing.

He's in pursuit of Harry Lime, "just about the worst racketeer" in Vienna.

Harry's girlfriend, Anna, is played by the lovely and innocent Valli.

So much for our cast of characters, but I've left out the bomb-damaged city of Vienna itself -- an extraordinary character which makes the film -- and I've also left out the music. Almost every piece of music is a zither solo, which sounds absurd but turns out to be exactly -- I mean exactly -- right.

Shortly after his arrival, Holly Martins discovers that his friend from student days, Harry Lime, the man who has brought him to Vienna to work for him, died in a road accident a few days earlier, leaving a distraught Anna behind him.

Holly falls for her, of course, and also discovers something fishy about the "accident" -- was Harry, in fact, murdered?

The scene is set for what turns out to be a thrilling, emotional journey with characters about whom we really care very much indeed -- a testimony to the acting, since the script is, frankly, rather sketchy on some of the backstories.

The script... well, actually, despite that sketchiness, is amazing. Graham Greene (who, let's not forget, was also a cinema critic in an earlier part of his life) produced the movie script of all time, and Orson Welles -- the great Orson Welles -- ad libbed one of the most memorable movie speeches ever.

Welles is on screen for only a little over ten minutes -- in fact, he doesn't even appear until we are well over an hour into a 100 minute movie -- but our memory of him dominates the film. He truly was a King Actor. And his Harry Lime is one of the great screen villains of all time.

I must have seen this 1949 movie two or three dozen times. Seeing it again, this evening, I had gooseflesh. My muscles tensed with the stress, I was laughing out loud at the rather plentiful jokes, and I even found myself crying at the tragedy of it all.

There are very good editions in both DVD and Blu-ray format. You have no excuse.