00:01Is this the most beautiful film ever made?
00:04Carol Reid's 1949 epic The Third Man is considered one of the greatest British films
00:08of all time, a gloriously dreamlike jaunt into post-war Vienna that wields a scathing
00:14melancholy to immense effect.
00:17It's also stunning to look at, with Reid and cinematographer Robert Krasker transforming
00:21Vienna into an ethereal urban maze in which our protagonist, Joseph Cotton's Holly Martens,
00:27descends further and further into over the course of the film.
00:30The Webb, Reid and Krasker Weave also frames Vienna as a sort of constricting prison, which
00:35becomes most pronounced in the final act, where Martens' old friend Harry Lyme, played by
00:40a typically brilliant Orson Welles, is trying to escape the various occupying police forces.
00:45It's here the film conjures its most immortal frames, one of the best of which sees Harry
00:50reaching to the surface for freedom, the sewer grate the bars of a prison he'll never leave.
00:56It's just so beautiful.
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