Starring: Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Orson Welles
Director: Carol Reed
Running Time: 104 mins
Certificate: PG
Release Date: July 20th 2015 (UK)

As you might have guessed, a lot of my friends are film fans. However, I was genuinely surprised how few of them had seen The Third Man. Everyone had heard of it, knew Orson Welles was in it and quite a few knew cuckoo clocks were involved somehow, but hardly any had seen it all the way through.

That’s a shame, as it’s a great film. The wonderful Joseph Cotten (who should be considered one of the screen’s greatest actors but normally gets overlooked) plays pulp novelist Holly Martins, who arrives in Vienna to start a new job that’s been offered to him by his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles). He finds a city that in the post-war era is still in crisis and where the black market is flourishing. [Read more…]