The Third Man
The Beverly Theater
Monday, Feb 24, 2025 9:00 PM
April 9 2023
1949, 104 minutes
Directed by Carol Reed
4K RESTORATION
While not quite fitting into our Lit Movie series of films based on books or documentaries about writers, The Third Man is a cinema classic with a fictional writer as the lead character. And the script was written by famed British novelist Graham Greene. Later there was a novel with the same name by Greene, but that book is from a fuller treatment Greene had written for himself and published only after the film came out.
Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a writer of pulp Westerns, arrives in a bombed-out, post-war Vienna at the invitation of his childhood friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) only to find him dead. Martins develops the ultimate conspiracy theory after learning of a “third man” present at the time of Harry’s death, butting up against interference from British police officer Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), and falling head-over-heels for Harry’s grief-stricken lover Anna (Alida Valli).
Containing some of the most ic