I’m a big fan of Film Noir. I enjoy the texture created by the high contrast grainy black and white film, the classically beautifully women, the amount of tangible danger that seems much more realistic than most modern films are able to build and the over all intensity of atmosphere.

Over the past month or so Ive found my self watching a film titled The Third Man over and over.  Part of the film plays out as an internal narrative thats a bit like an M Night Shyamalan film but Carol Reed has the artistic integrity to not show you the costumes hidden in the shed.  He weaves this narrative in a very effective manor, so effective that after the first time the film ended I immediately started the film over.  I can only think of one other movie that got my brain rolling enough to take the time to watch it again right away.  The original movie poster for the film speaks to this internal narrative: 

In the same way that great bands function as a dynamic cohesive unit to create a unique and engaging sound the people involved with creating this film poured out the same level of energy.  Speaking of music, I was driving to work the other day listening to The Band and realized they covered the infectious theme song that will stay in your head for days.  I always thought it was odd they had a song called The Third Man Theme and wondered what the story was but never looked into it.

There is far too much that happens in this film to discuss in detail so without giving away too much about the film here is a brief synopsis:

Here we meet our main character an American named Holly Martins, carelessly walking under a ladder, who has just arrived in postwar Vienna completely ignorant of the fact that he is no longer in America.  Upon arriving he finds out his friend he was going to Vienna to meet has died in a tragic car crash that no one really understands or can paint a clear picture of how it happened.

Holly decides he wants to investigate the death of his friend, the first person he encounters is a police officer named Major Calloway who suggests that  Harry Lime may not be the person Holly thinks he is.  Holly exits this scene by asking one of Calloway’s men if he has read his novel “The Lone Rider of Santa Fe” which is about a man who hunts down a sheriff who is trying to victimize his best friend    

Here Holly meets up with another freind of Harry lime, a man that suggests that he stay out of all this trouble because there are things he doesn’t understand that he should stay out of.  Holly, being being portrayed as the prototypical American by an English film maker, ignores this advice.  

Oh how subjective our opinions are to our own reality.  Though Carol Reed is some what mocking the idea of the American cowboyesque swagger, the idea subjective reality is embraced through out the film.

In this scene Holly goes to play. He is to meet up with a woman, of course there is always a woman involved, in the play that might be able to give him some insight as to how his friend died 

Holly Martins: I really enjoyed the play

Anna Schmidt: Do you even speak German, Mr. Martins? 

This scene Holly Martins finally meets up with his friend Harry Lime inside a ferris wheel car.

Harry Lime: You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

After speaking with his presumed deceased friend, a confounded Holly Martins lights up a cigarette in contemplation of the events that just transpired  

In the final scene full of dramatic cinematography Harry Lime makes a daring escape from the Vienna police through the use of his intricate knowledge of the city’s sewers