By Will Barber Taylor

On its release in 1949, Carol Reed’s atmospheric film noir thriller The Third Man instantly became a classic, winning the Palm d’Or at Cannes, a BAFTA for Best British Film, and the Oscar for Best Cinematography. Featuring some of cinema’s most memorable set pieces and quotable lines, the film’s war-torn Viennese locations quickly etch themselves in the memory—the vast sewers, the Ferris wheel, the tree-lined cemetery. It marks one of those unusual conjunctions of script, director, subject, cast, and setting—and, of course, music—in which everything works. 

So reads the opening to the blurb for The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film, a mammoth new coffee table book from John Walsh author of other official stories including Dr Who and the Daleks and Conan the Barbarian. Everything is true and as the description says, everything works about this classic film once called the best British film ever made. It has everything from the hollowed out shell of 1940s Vienna casting an atmospheric spectre over the proceedings to the enigmatic Harry Lime, one of Orson Welles’ greatest parts. 

Walsh’s book seeks to shine a light on all these facets of the film and more, providing an in-depth and authoritative account of how a such a powerful film, revolutionary for its time in its use of location filming and one that seemed to evolve throughout its production, came to be. Walsh’s commentary, intermingling interviews and contextual information about the background of the key players in the production of the film, effortlessly moves from exploring how Graham Greene’s inspiration for the film began with him writing the prophetic line “I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand” to the film’s cultural impact. Even with this first line Greene was setting the precedent both for the plot of the eventual feature film and how people have thought of it ever since – a work that seems both ghostlike and real at the same time, magically ethereal yet immutably solid. 

From that line on Walsh guides the reader through the production of the film, from the casting to the shooting to the final release aided by a magnificent array of gorgeously rendered photographs, many of them never seen before prior to the release of this book. The film’s secrets are lavishly exposed throughout, from how Carol Reed managed to film the famous reveal of Harry Lime to how the film almost never featured its illusive star. The balance between Walsh’s commentary and the pictures is always perfectly split meaning that one never outweighs the other in its value to the reader, both act as the ultimate guide to understanding this most fascinating of films, the visuals perfectly intertwining with Walsh’s descriptions. 

The Third Man: The Official Story of the Film is sure to be a treat for any film buff. It is an authoritative and comprehension guide to one of cinema’s greatest achievements that is a delight to read either for someone who has only seen the film once or for a devoted fan of perhaps the greatest film of the 1940s. 

If you would like to purchase a copy of the book you can do so here. If you would like to read my interview with author John Walsh, you can read it here.