The Third Man

Who was the man that was helping carry the body? I watch the movie The Third Man, it was much more entertaining then I expected. This film came out just past the point when film noir was slowly coming to an end. The Third Man, directed by Carol Reed was released in 1949. This movie tells the story of a crime novelist, Holly Martians, in post war Vienna that was looking for information about a friend of his that had died. The way that he knew the character, Harry Lime, was they were good only friends. The story about how Harry Lime was hit buy a truck and then rushed to the ambulance. The question that was raised was who was the third man that helped carry the body. As the story unfolds, there are many different versions to how Harry Lime died. Later it was revealed how Lime was involved with the black market with selling water with penicillin mixes while consumers thought that they were buying full penicillin. In addition, the man that Harry Lime worked with was missing. I really liked how the second half of this film had a lot of German expressionism while the earlier part of the movie had more of American Film Noir.
In the beginning of the film, the movie was a man searching for answers about Harry Lime. I did in fact feel a lot of connections to this film to Citizen Kane in terms of understanding and discovering the life of a recently dead man. The novelist, played by Joseph Coten, was a very interesting character for he would interview people to understand what really happened the day Harry Lime died. Later in the film, it seemed to grow darker both visually and in the story telling. The lead in to when Orson Wells character was amazing for it happened with very hard lighting and shadows. When he was revealed, he has a boyish charm to him but as the script later showed, he was a much darker individual. I felt that a perfect moment that the film was both noir and German expressionism was when he was discovered by the police when he was about to meet with Martins. The chase sequence was a beautiful displace of shadows.