The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard. It is particularly remembered for its atmospheric cinematography, performances, and musical score.The screenplay was written by novelist Graham Greene, who subsequently published the novella of the same name (which he had originally written as a preparation for the screenplay). Anton Karas wrote and performed the score, which used only the zither; its title music "The Third Man Theme" topped the international music charts in 1950.

Plot
American pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Post-World War II Vienna seeking his childhood friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has offered him a job. Martins discovers that Lime was killed by a car while crossing the street. At Lime's funeral, Martins meets two British Army Police: Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee), a fan of Martins's books, and his superior, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard). Afterwards Martins is asked to give a lecture to a book club a few days later. He then meets a friend of Lime's, "Baron" Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), who tells Martins that he and another friend, Popescu (Siegfried Breuer), carried Lime to the side of the street after the accident and, before he died, Lime asked them to take care of Martins and Lime's actress girlfriend, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli).

Martins goes to see Anna and becomes suspicious that Lime's death was not an accident. The porter at Lime's apartment building says that Lime was killed immediately and that three men carried the body, not two. Martins and Anna discover that the police are searching her flat; the police confiscate a forged passport and detain her. The next evening Martins visits Lime's "medical adviser", Dr. Winkel (Erich Ponto), who says that he arrived at the accident after Lime was dead, and only two men were there.

The porter offers to give Martins more information, but someone kills him before Martins can see him. When Martins arrives, the crowd believes that he is involved and becomes hostile. Escaping from them, Martins returns to the hotel, and a cab immediately takes him to the book club, where he makes a poor speech. When Popescu enters, he asks about Martins's next book. Martins says that it will be called The Third Man, "a murder story" inspired by facts. Popescu tells Martins that he should stick to fiction. Martins sees two thugs advancing towards him and flees.

Calloway again advises Martins to leave Vienna, but Martins refuses and demands that Lime's death be investigated. Calloway reveals that Lime's racket was stealing penicillin from military hospitals, diluting it, and selling it on the black market, leading to many deaths. Martins, convinced, agrees to leave.

Martins learns that Anna too has been told about Lime's crimes and is about to be sent to the Soviet sector. Leaving her apartment, Martins notices someone watching from a dark doorway. A shaft of light reveals the person to be Lime, who flees, ignoring Martins's calls, and vanishes. Martins summons Calloway, who deduces that Lime has escaped through the sewers. The British police exhume Lime's coffin and discover that the body is that of the orderly who stole the penicillin for Lime.

The next day, Martins meets with Lime, and they ride Vienna's Ferris wheel, the Wiener Riesenrad. Lime obliquely threatens Martins, reveals the full extent of his ruthlessness, and then reiterates his job offer before leaving quickly. Calloway then asks Martins to help capture Lime, and Martins agrees, asking for Anna's safe conduct out of Vienna in exchange. However, when Anna learns this, she refuses to leave. Exasperated, Martins decides to leave, but on the way to the airport, Calloway stops at a hospital to show Martins children dying of meningitis who had been treated with Lime's diluted penicillin.

Lime arrives to rendezvous with Martins, but Anna warns him. He tries once again to escape using the sewer tunnels, but the police are there in force. Lime shoots and kills Paine, but Calloway shoots and wounds Lime. Badly injured, Lime drags himself up a ladder to a street grating, but he cannot lift it. Martins then kills him using Paine's revolver. Later, Martins attends Lime's second funeral. At the risk of missing his flight out of Vienna, he waits to speak to Anna, but she ignores him and walks past.

Reception
In the United Kingdom it was the most popular movie at the British box office for 1949. In Austria, "local critics were underwhelmed" and the film ran for only a few weeks. Still, the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung, although critical of a "not-too-logical plot", praised the film's "masterful" depiction of a "time out of joint" and the city's atmosphere of "insecurity, poverty and post-war immorality". William Cook, after his 2006 visit to an eight-room museum in Vienna dedicated to the film, wrote "In Britain it's a thriller about friendship and betrayal. In Vienna it's a tragedy about Austria's troubled relationship with its past."

Upon its release in Britain and America, the film received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time magazine called the film "crammed with cinematic plums that would do the early Hitchcock proud—ingenious twists and turns of plot, subtle detail, full-bodied bit characters, atmospheric backgrounds that become an intrinsic part of the story, a deft commingling of the sinister with the ludicrous, the casual with the bizarre."  Bosley Crowther, after a prefatory qualification that the film was "designed [only] to excite and entertain", wrote that Reed "brilliantly packaged the whole bag of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor [sic] also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre."  One of the very rare exceptions was the British communist paper The Daily Worker of 3 September 1949 which complained that "no effort is spared to make the Soviet authorities as sinister and unsympathetic as possible."

Critics today have hailed the film as a masterpiece. Roger Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list and wrote, "Of all the movies that I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies." Gene Siskel remarked it was an "exemplary piece of moviemaking, highlighting the ruins of WWII and juxtaposing it with the characters' own damaged histories".[citation needed] James Berardinelli has also praised the film, calling the film a "must-see" for lovers of film noir.

Awards and honours
The Third Man won the 1949 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival,[35] the British Academy Award for Best Film, and an Academy Award for Best Black and White Cinematography in 1950.

In 1999 the British Film Institute selected The Third Man as the best British film of the 20th century; five years later, the magazine Total Film ranked it fourth. The film also placed 57th on the American Film Institute's list of top American films in 1998, though the film's only American connections were its executive co-producer, David O. Selznick and actors Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton. (The other two, Sir Alexander Korda and Carol Reed, were of Hungarian and British origin respectively.) In June 2008, the AFI revealed its "10 Top 10"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. The Third Man was acknowledged as the fifth best film in the mystery genre.[36] In 2005, viewers of BBC Television's Newsnight Review voted the film their fourth favourite of all time; it was the only film in the top five made prior to 1970. The "American Film Institute" chose the film in the following categories:

AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies - #57
AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills - #75
AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:
Harry Lime - #37 Villain

AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
"In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." – Nominated

AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores - Nominated
AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) - Nominated
10 Top 10 #5 mystery film

In Vienna there is a 'Third Man Museum' dedicated to the film