by Franz Amussen
Nuart Theatre showcases a flawless new print of Carol’s Reed’s 1949 masterpiece
THIS WEEK the Nuart Theatre in West Los Angeles has a very special treat for real movie fans with a one-week exclusive engagement of Carol Reed’s noir masterpiece The Third Man.
Over the past few years the 1949 classic has undergone a painstaking ‘4K restoration’ – the state-of-the art digital remastering that captures all the beauty of the original print, and even improves on it. The ultra-high resolution restoration allows each frame to be digitally polished to remove noise and scratches. Colours and contrast from fast-fading film stock can also be sympathetically enhanced for an on-screen look that’s literally as good as new. And for a movie that relies so heavily on detail and contrast, it’s hard to imagine a classic that has benefitted more from this welcome new technology.
The film follows an idealistic, out of work pulp fiction novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) as he travels to post-war Vienna in search of a job from with his old friend, the shadowy black marketer Harry Lime (Orson Welles). Unfortunately Lime has recently died in a peculiar car accident – allegedly. As Martins tries to find the truth behind Lime’s ‘death’, he quickly finds his assumptions and ideals confounded among the rubble, shifting loyalties and flexible morality of the Austrian capital, divided as it was between the four major powers.
The film is astonishingly atmospheric with every almost frame hypnotically composed and filmed, and benefits from English stalwarts Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee among the cast.
A rare collaboration of legendary producers Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick, The Third Man was Reed’s second teaming with novelist/screenwriter Graham Greene. An instant critical and commercial sensation, it won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, the British Film Academy’s Best British Film award, and an Academy Award for Robert Krasker’s expressionist, now iconic black and white cinematography, and was also Oscar-nominated for Best Director. Anton Karas’ haunting “Third Man Theme,” performed by the composer on a zither, was a worldwide hit.
THE THIRD MAN remains the only movie on both the American Film Institute and British Film Institute Top 100 lists of, respectively, the greatest American and British films of all time (the British named it their Number One), as well as being as well as being named The Greatest Foreign Film of All Time… by the Japanese.
The film continues to top critics’ lists of favorite films to this day. The New Yorker’s David Denby described the film as: “The supreme movie about the night world, the ultimate example of that shining-streets-and-lurking-shadows realism”, while Newsweek’s David Ansen gushed: “I can only envy the viewer who gets to encounter The Third Man for the first time.”
The Nuart is located at 11272 Santa Monica Blvd, just east of Sawtelle Boulevard in West Los Angeles. For showtimes, visit www.landmarktheatres.com
