American pulp novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) finds himself summoned to divided postwar Vienna by his old chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who isn't there to greet him on account of just having been run over and killed in the street — possibly on purpose, or possibly not at all. Drunk and deeply bemused, Holly descends right away into a grand dark labyrinth of midcentury, middle-European corruption. His doubtful companions on this journey include a singularly brisk police major (Trevor Howard), and the Czech refugee (Alida Valli) who was Lime's most recent girlfriend. It's all just so glum and glorious. So why not behold again, this gleaming relic: Carol Reed's 1949 film of Graham Greene's script, famously and triumphantly supplemented by Welles' crisp and cynical little "cuckoo clock" speech. Never mind about this razor-sharp new digital restoration, which isn't really the reason to see it (and in some quarters has been decried). The reason to see it is to indulge the privilege of peeking back at a beautiful moment when cinema seemed to have found its true purpose, probing the shadows of civilization itself. Even all these many decades later, you won't find a more stylish study of pure, polite evil. Much of The Third Man's exquisitely sardonic tone is there in Anton Karas' great zither music, brazenly if wistfully implying the possibility of comedy forever out of reach. That music corresponds perfectly to Welles' face, smirking in the dark, and to his outsized talent for entrances and exits. A climactic chiaroscuro sewer-tunnel chase luxuriates in the utter noir-ness of it all, wanting never to end. These many decades later, it still hasn't.
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