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The Third Man
U.K., 1949
Joan Didion counted Carol Reed’s tenebrous thriller, about a writer investigating the suspicious circumstances of a friend’s death in postwar Vienna, among her favorites. “It works at every level in a very clean economical way,” she once explained. “Anyone writing for the screen could learn a lot from the penicillin montage—it gives you the plot in a very short amount of screen time, yet when you actually analyze it, there are no details. Just images.”
DCP, b&w, 93 min. Director: Carol Reed. Screenwriter: Graham Greene. With: Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles.