The Third Man

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

A black-and-white thriller set in the rubble of post-war Vienna, directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene. If you can talk about a divided city, a ruined moral world and a friendship that turns to dust, you can write about almost any comparative question on this film.

The story is simple to summarise and hard to forget. Holly Martins, an American writer of cheap pulp westerns, arrives in Vienna because his old friend Harry Lime has offered him a job. He gets there to find that Lime is dead, supposedly knocked down by a car outside his own building. Martins goes to the funeral, refuses to believe it was an accident, and starts asking questions like one of the detectives in his own novels. The more he digs, the worse the truth gets. Vienna in these years is carved into four zones run by the Americans, the British, the French and the Soviets, and a man with the right contacts can sell almost anything. Lime, it turns out, has been stealing penicillin from military hospitals, watering it down and selling it on the black market. Children in the wards die or are left brain-damaged because of what he sells. And then Martins discovers the thing the whole film has been building towards: Lime is not dead at all.

That discovery turns a detective story into a moral one. Martins is caught between his loyalty to a charming old friend and the evidence laid out by the British officer Major Calloway, who wants Martins to help trap Lime. The two men meet again high above the city on the Prater Ferris wheel, where Lime talks about the people far below as if they were dots, things rather than lives. The film moves towards its famous chase through the Vienna sewers, lit in hard shadow, and ends on one of the most quietly brutal final shots in cinema. Reed shoots the whole thing on tilted angles, wet cobblestones and looming walls, with Anton Karas’s zither score running underneath, so the city itself feels off-balance and untrustworthy. Loyalty, justice, corruption and the outsider who does not belong: it is all here, and it travels easily across the modes.

Study The Third Man

Start with the one angle below. It gives you the world the story lives in, the part of the film examiners reward most when you can use it as comparison rather than just retell the plot.