No.6’s Greatest Films of All Time: The Third Man

United Kingdom, United States, 1949 / 105 Mins

Director: Carol Reed

Starring: Joseph Cotten, Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard, Paul Hoerbiger, Ernst Deutsch, Erich Ponto, Siegfried Breuer, Hedwig Bleibtreu, Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Geoffrey Keen

In 1949, an American writer of westerns, Holly Martins, arrives in post-war Vienna to visit his old friend Harry Lime. On arrival, he learns that his friend has been killed in a street accident and when he meets Calloway, chief of the British Military Police in Vienna, he is informed that Lime was in fact a black marketer wanted by the police. He decides to prove Harry's innocence, but is Harry really dead?