Graham Greene is the most cinematic of novelists; his every story reads like a film-script. Moreover, no other living writer has succeeded quite as well in marrying the technique of a perfectly ordinary though competent thriller to a study of existing society; his works are at once exciting and bitterly, acutely studious of modern life. ╥The Third Man╙ (at the Plaza) is Carol Reed╒s second essay in collaboration with Mr. Greene and, as in ╥The Fallen Idol,╙ the collaboration has been wonderfully close, sensitive, and fruitful. ╥The Third Man╙ is, typically, a thriller ╤ a good one too ╤ about black-marketeering, intrigue, and murder. But, again typically, it is a thriller set in post-war Vienna, and what raises it right out of the ordinary is in the first place that, more perhaps than any other post-war film, it gives a convincing impression of life among the half-ruins under quadripartite control. The impression is conveyed very quietly. There are singularly few shots of Vienna╒s ruins: there is, instead, a deft accumulation of those details which make up the life of the ╥occupied╙ Viennese. This, in fact, is a film full of singularly effective details ╤ details of terror, of beauty, and, not least, of humour.
Carol Reed, besides directing this film, also produced it jointly with the American David Selznick. Among his principal players were two Americans (Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten), an Italian (the exquisite Valli), and the supporting cast consisted almost entirely of players of German, Austrian, or other central European origin. The paradox of it is that the film is, nonetheless, singularly British. The two players who mark the story most strongly are Trevor Howard, as a rather bitter-mouthed British security officer, and Bernard Lee, as a quietly comic and true-to-life British sergeant.
With this abundance of praise, there must, however, be one important reservation about the film. In Graham Greene╒s best work the marriage between the bitter ╥life-study╙ and the thriller is entirely successful. But in his second-best the marriage is sometimes less perfect ╤ with the result, as a rule, that the serious literary element looks a bit awkward in its gangster company. ╥The Third Man╙ is perhaps a case of the second-best. What happens, at all events, is that after the incomparably clever scene-setting, which occupies much of the early part, the latter part descends almost to the level of merely competent ╥cops and robbers.╙ For instance, the long hunt through the Viennese sewers (which is the film╒s climax) is very well done in its way, but is a familiar and fairly easy way.
