Mostly shot on location, the movie is full of shady characters depicting a fading era in a famously corrupt city trying to cope with change amid moral decay. Mysterious forces abound. Folks get murdered. There is a love interest. Law enforcement is everywhere. The chief villain is almost sympathetic. The soundtrack is striking. So is the acting. Memorable scenes and dialogue abound. After all the carnage, you don’t know watching the ending whether to cry or cheer, but you know you’ve seen something profound.
Since I am New To Las Vegas, you might think I’m writing about “Casino.” That’s the 1995 Martin Scorsese-directed movie starting Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone about the rise–and fall–of corrupt mob control over the casinos that help build up Las Vegas.
But I’m not. Instead, I’m describing “The Third Man.” The film noir, starring Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard and Alida Valli, is about corruption in post-World War II Vienna, Austria. The flick had its world premiere in London exactly 75 years ago today, in 1949.
Today, “The Third Man” is not all that well known beyond film aficionados. But it is on just about every list of the 100 greatest movies ever made, and maybe the best ever to come out of a United Kingdom studio. Unlike “Casino,” the movie even won an Oscar, for the stark, haunting, black-and-white cinematography of Robert Krasker. Much of the footage, it seems, was made by cameramen lying at night on the ground of bombed-out Vienna shooting up at odd angles.
Why am I writing about ‘”The Third Man?” I was in Vienna last month on holiday, and had occasion to pass by some of the actual shooting locations. One was the Wiener Riesenrad, the 127-year-old Ferris wheel towering 212 feet (but still less than half the height of Las Vegas’s High Roller) that is the setting for a key scene in the movie. Another was Wiener Zentralfriedhof, Vienna’s main cemetery (surprisingly, only 40 years older than Las Vegas’s first cemetery) where in the movie there are two funerals for the same person. A third was the Hotel Sacher, once the ho-hum headquarters for the British military occupation where key scenes were shot but now a ritzy five-star hotel, across the street from the Vienna State Opera.
I took the cheeky Wien Kanal system’s land and underground tour of several sites where striking scenes in the movie were shot of hunters and prey, even learning something about European sanitation procedures. During the tour, scenes from the movie were actually broadcast on the walls of what has to be the planet’s smelliest theater. I even visited The Third Man Museum, said to be the only one in the world devoted to a single movie. Continue reading
