The Third Man

A cynical classic, the most famous collaboration between director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene follows the search of American writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) for his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in postwar Vienna. The quest ranges down rubble-strewn streets and to the Prater’s Ferris wheel, culminating, appropriately, in the sewers. Seeing the film in a theater, Elvis Mitchell wrote in the New York Times, “is like watching it for the first time. . . . Few movies hold up as startlingly well as this mixture of perversity, anxiety, guilt, and adventure.”