The movie Roger Ebert wanted “on the altar of my love for the cinema”
People are completely entitled to place their personal favourite movies on the loftiest of pedestals, and even though he was paid to offer unbiased critique and analysis on almost everything cinema had to offer, Roger Ebert was no different.
He may have made his name, built his career, and gone down in the history books as one of the industry’s most vaunted critics and reviewers, but he was a cinephile at heart, first and foremost. Plus, the film he came close to deifying deserves that status when it’s undoubtedly one of the most important and influential ever made.
At a time when film noir was at the apex of its popularity, it took something pretty special to stand out from among an increasingly crowded pack. It goes without saying that Carol Reed’s The Third Man had those intangibles in spades, with its expressionistic cinematography, all-time great introduction of Orson Welles’ Harry Lime, iconic theme music, ominous atmosphere, and engrossing central mystery continuing to influence the hard-boiled thriller to this day.
For Ebert, it was akin to a transformative experience, to the point he acknowledged that “this movie is on the altar of my love for the cinema.” That’s high praise, but it was clear why he’d become so taken with the timeless classic when it served as an eye-opening moment during a formative time in his life.
“I saw it for the first time in a little fleabox of a theatre on the Left Bank in Paris, in 1962, during my first $5 a day trip to Europe,” he explained. “It was so sad, so beautiful, so romantic, that it became at once a part of my own memories; as if it had happened to me.”
Reflecting on the “infinite poignancy” of the love Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins carries for Alida Valli’s Anna Schmidt, Ebert couldn’t appraise The Third Man without pointing to Welles making “the most dramatic entrance in the history of the cinema” because no discussion of Reed’s monolithic puzzle box is complete without it.
“Apart from the story, look at the visuals,” Ebert continued. “The tense conversation on the giant Ferris wheel. The giant, looming shadows at night. The carnivorous faces of people seen in the bombed-out streets of post-war Vienna, where the movie was shot on location. The chase through the sewers.” All of them are unforgettable moments in their own right, with The Third Man a masterclass in capturing the very best technical, artistic, and performative elements of the art form.
The film is worthy of every single shred of praise that continues being showered upon it more than 70 years on from its release, etched into history as one a genuine landmark moment that altered the language of cinema forever.
