The Third Man: the greatest entrance in film is also the best clue

Carol Reed’s 1949 film is a mystery about a man investigating a friend’s death in occupied Vienna, and it is one of the few films where the setting is doing as much work as the plot.

Vienna as the case

The city is divided into occupation zones, bombed out, running on a black market. Every piece of the mystery is shaped by that: who can cross which sector, what is scarce enough to be worth killing over, which authority has jurisdiction where.

Reed shoots it in tilted angles and enormous shadows, which has been imitated so much it risks looking like cliché. It was not, then, and the technique is doing something specific — nothing in this city sits level.

The entrance

There is a moment, roughly two thirds in, that is routinely called the best character entrance ever filmed. It is about four seconds long. We will not spoil it, but note that the film has been withholding one particular thing, and when it stops withholding, the whole preceding hour reorganises itself.

The last shot

Held far longer than any editor would allow now — a single unbroken shot of a road, for close to a minute. It is the correct ending and it refuses the one the audience wants.

Watch it if

You want to see how a mystery uses place. Also for the zither score, which should not work at all and is the most memorable thing about the film for a lot of people.