The Third Man (1949) ✦ Full-Length Watchalong Reaction
Added 2025-04-03 16:03:14 +0000 UTCHi everyone! Thank you so much to Nicholas B for picking this for his Member of the Month win (March 2025). This movie was a TIME and I'm so so excited to talk about it and read your comments! Please enjoy! [Direct link here.]
✦ KL
Comments
Ahh I forgot it was in that poll! Cool, thank you! And thanks for all that info too. 😀
kaiielle
2025-05-13 13:26:08 +0000 UTCFor me, this film is about capitalism and its impersonality—a system that prioritize money over actual human beings. Harry is a walking and talking manifestation of capitalism’s charm and savagery. Wells does such a good job at being Harry that we can forget how awful he really is. Harry’s cleverness and swagger sweep us away until we get a look at how ugly Harry’s ruthless greed actually is. His talk with Martins at the Ferris Wheel makes his mindset clear, but we don’t really get to understand it—to really feel it—until Calloway takes Martins to the children’s ward at the hospital. No one is safe from Harry’s greed. Interestingly, there was a radio show that aired after the film came out which essentially ignored Harry’s villainy and tried to turn him into a roguish hero. Ostensibly set before Harry’s death, the show was called “The Adventures of Harry Lime,” and Orson Wells even played Harry on the show and wrote a few episodes as well. You can find most of the episodes on YouTube if you look around—worth a listen if you like old school radio dramas. It really is doing its own thing though, and I really see the Harry on the show as a completely different character than the Harry in the film. Anyway, as I may have mentioned before, the film definitely rewards a re-watch. I also forgot to mention why I picked it—it is one of my favorite films, but I specifically picked it because it was in your Mr. Robot poll a while back, and you had said you wanted to, eventually, get to all of those. So check this off the list!
Nicholas Bielik
2025-05-13 09:23:20 +0000 UTCAlso, I put a little image connection between The Third Man and another film you've seen in the Patreon section of the Discord. I recognized the church immediately, and then I started thinking...
Tyler Foster
2025-04-06 23:42:40 +0000 UTCAnother term for the 4:3/1.33:1 aspect ratio is "Academy ratio." Although Carol Reed was a man, I detect a hint of skepticism in your closing comments that is actually misplaced. The person who is generally considered to be the very first film director was a woman (Alice Guy-Blache), and much of early Hollywood (1890s-1910s) was defined by women. Film directors like Lois Weber and Dorothy Arzner were major figures in that era. By the late 1940s/early 1950s, the industry was shifting toward men, but Ida Lupino would be a notable example of a woman who was making movies in that era, and even specifically made a noir with The Hitch-Hiker (1953). I kinda wonder if Carol Reed liked making a movie about a man named Holly Martins. One animal hint that seemed to slip past you: when Martins visits Dr. Winkel for the first time, the Dr. shoos a dog into another room -- Baron Kurtz's little dog, because he's hiding in the other room. On the other hand, after the cat runs away, Anna comments that the cat only ever liked Harry. Although I feel like you didn't notice this consciously, maybe subconsciously you understood that the cat's purring was meant to indicate that the shadowy figure outside is the cat's favorite, Harry. This is a film noir, and one of the most famous, although it is more in the theme of desperation and the visual style that this one checks off the familiar noir boxes. While this gets fairly tense in the end, I think people tend to remember noir as sweaty tension all the way through, and with more manipulative femme fatales, with snappy one-liners. For a classic example of film noir, my go-to is the stone cold classic Double Indemnity (1944). As far as Orson Welles goes, I think you're remembering David and Goliath from the famous myth, not specifically his movie. Citizen Kane is indeed the big one, which he not only stars in but also wrote and directed, and which largely invented the contemporary language of filmmaking. Touch of Evil is another noir and another genre all-timer, and for another noir, Welles was also in a great movie called The Stranger.
Tyler Foster
2025-04-06 07:09:31 +0000 UTCWATCH HERE: https://youtu.be/awn7jYAuQIU
kaiielle
2025-04-03 17:13:18 +0000 UTCLet me look into this on my end.
kaiielle
2025-04-03 16:27:02 +0000 UTCanyone else having issues getting their Patreon to authorize?
codenamewitch xx
2025-04-03 16:17:40 +0000 UTC
