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.

With a spoiler alert, here’s the plot of  “The Third Man.” It opens with a narrative overview, voiced by its British director, Carol Reed (1906-1976), of 1949-ish war-torn Vienna with scenes of ruins, desperation, black-market activity, even a floating body. “We’d run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay.” intones Reed. Following World War II and the country’s release from Hitler’s compelled annexation, Vienna is divided into five occupation zones–American, British, French, Russian and one in the center of town that is jointly administered.

Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton) is a dashing but reckless and alcoholic third-rate American author of pulp Westerns (“The Lone Rider of Santa Fe” and “Oklahoma Kid” are two of his titles). Broke, he travels to Vienna at the behest of an old American friend named Harry Lime (Orson Wells), hired to do P.R. for Lime’s supposed humanitarian charity. But Martins arrives to find a funeral underway at Wiener Zentralfriedhof for Lime, said to have be killed when he was run over by a car while crossing the street in from of his apartment building.

Martin grows suspicious about the circumstances of Lime’s death. He meets Lime’s distraught girlfriend, theater actress Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). Together (and as Martins is falling in love with her), they uncover discrepancies in the witness accounts of Lime’s death. Did he die immediately, or was he able to speak after the accident? Did two men carry him to the side of the road? Or was it three, as the super at Lime’s building said? After Martins inadvertently lets on that the super knows something different to one of Lime’s cronies, the super is murdered. Eventually, Martins himself is chased by unknown pursuers across the ruins of destroyed buildings.

Martins learns from Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), a British military police officer, that Lime is a racketeer whose operatives steal penicillin, water it down to a point where it doesn’t work and sells it on the black market to unsuspecting buyers, who die or are maimed for life. Martins also learns about Schmidt’s own secrets: She has identity papers forged by Lime, is a Czech national with no right to live or work in the international zone and faces deportation to the hated Russian sector. In fact, the authorities are on to her.

But after visiting Schmidt’s apartment at night and then walking down a deserted Vienna street, Martins realizes he is being followed by someone hiding in the shadows. A sudden flash of light from an opened window above shows a very alive and grinning Harry Lime! (This occurs two-thirds of the way through the 93-minute movie but still ranks as one of the greatest reveals in cinema history.) Lime runs off and seemingly disappears into thin air. After Martins reports this to Calloway, the officer realizes that Lime went through a entrance to the sewer system and escaped to the Russian sector. Calloway orders the exhumation of Lime’s grave at Wiener Zentralfriedhof and finds the murdered body of a hospital orderly who was stealing the penicillin for Lime but being pressured to go states evidence. There was a Third Man, all right–Lime, murdering someone else to fake his own death (and get rid of another witness)!

Martins arranges to meet Lime (for the first time in decades) at an outdoor location, the Wiener Riesenrad, which they ride together. Lime obliquely threatens to kill Martins by shooting him and tossing him off the ride. But Lime backs off when Martins tells him Calloway knows he is still alive. Martins realizes it was Lime who tipped off the authorities about Schmidt’s forged papers. When the ride is over, Lime runs off, but not before amorally telling Martins in one of the movie’s most quoted lines:

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed; but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!

Martins agrees to help Calloway apprehend Lime if Schmidt is given safe passage out of Vienna to Paris. But a suspicious Schmidt still carries a torch for Lime. She stays. Martins arranges to meet Lime again at a cafe with hidden cops everywhere. But Schmidt is there and warns Lime. He takes off and drops into the Vienna sewer system. What ensues is a dramatic underground chase through sloshing sewage. It ends up with Lime killing Calloway’s sergeant assistant (a fan of Martin’s books) and then Martins killing Lime at the behest of Calloway with the sergeant’s gun. Not unlike the end, perhaps, of one of Martins’ cheap Western novels.

The final scene is Lime’s second funeral at Wiener Zentralfriedhof. Martins is there, and so is Schmidt. But as he leaves the cemetery, she marches right past him without a word or glance in his direction. A stark ending, and definitely not a happy one.

Besides its cinematography, acting, extreme cynicism (a penicillin diluter with a charity?) and accurate depicting of Vienna suffering, part of the movie’s wild initial appeal came from its distinctive soundtrack. It consists solely of a concert zither–a native Austrian string instrument played by plucking the strings while it lays on a table. The score was composed by Anton Karas (1906-1985), who is also the performer. In fact, the opening scene consists of Karas himself playing what became known as “The Harry Lime Theme.” The soundtrack became a worldwide hit. The opening bars are engraved on Karas’s own grave, in another Vienna cemetery.

The scriptwriter was the celebrated British novelist Graham Greene (1904-1991). It may not be a coincidence that Lime–the villain–is another word for green. Greene spent time in Vienna researching its black market and overall general lawlessness. Unlike “Casino,” which is based on the real life story of mob associate Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, “The Third Man” is not though to be closely based on specific characters. In fact, in a short novel of the same name Greene wrote before his script, Holly Martins was a Canadian author with a different name.

‘The Third Man” contains a heady whiff of Cold War politics and one upmanship. Greene’s script takes a number of shots at the Russians. It suggests the Soviets are protecting Lime, and not all that interested in solving the case of diluted penicillin  Led by Major Calloway, the Brits are depicted as heroes. The French and American are basically bystanders, except for Martins, who comes across as rather naive, and Lime, the killer, both Ugly Americans in their own ways. Because of the celebrated British spy scandal that broke years later involving Kim Philby sometimes dubbed the Cambridge Five, “The Third Man” is occasionally called a spy movie. But I didn’t see a spook anywhere in the flick. In 1955, East and West brokered a deal ending their occupation by which the Russians left Vienna and Austria on the provision that country not join NATO.

Alida Valli (1921-2006), who plays Anna Schmidt, the femme fatale, is not well known in the U.S. But in her day she was a Italian actress so famous she frequently was billed as just “Valli.” Mussolini once called her “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Most of her career was spent in Europe.

The bulk of the screen time in “The Third Man” belongs to the veteran actor Joseph Cotton (1905-1994). But in streaming service promotions today for the movie (it’s currently available on Prime Video), it is Orson Welles (1915-1985) whose image dominates. These days, Wells easily is the most famous actor in the movie, perhaps because the cinematography bears a resemblance to his 1941 masterpiece, “Citizen Kane,” which he starred in and directed. But it’s just not fair to Cotton (who was also in “Citizen Kane.”). Welles doesn’t even make an appearance in “The Third Man” until more than halfway through. He probably has less than 10 minutes total of screen time, and–no specimen of physical fitness–much of those long shots are of his double running through Vienna streets and sewers. Even then, some of those scenes were shot in a London studio.

To me, Las Vegas’s mob provenance and Vienna’s period of lawlessness are simply conditions separated at birth.

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