THE THIRD MAN
Sunday, August 8th at 1:00 p.m.
and Tuesday, August 10th at 7:00 p.m.
Admission: FREE
**Suggested donation: $5.00**
NEWLY RESTORED 60TH ANNIVERSARY FILM PRINT!
ESSENTIAL CINEMA is The Loft's FREE monthly series of classic art films on the big screen. See old favorites, hidden gems and exciting re-discoveries the way they were meant to be seen - with an audience and on the big screen in glorious 35 mm!
"ONE GREAT SCENE AFTER ANOTHER! One great shot after another! I've seen it 50 times and it's still magic!" - Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN TIMES
“QUITE SIMPLY, ONE OF THE FINEST FILMS EVER MADE! Seeing it on the big screen is like watching it for the first time.” - Elvis Mitchell, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“ONE OF THOSE MIRACULOUS FILMS THAT WORK ON EVERY LEVEL. A sharp, exciting thriller!” - THE ONION AV CLUB
“In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
In rubble-strewn postwar Vienna, Joseph Cotten’s pulp Western writer Holly Martins arrives to meet up with his old friend Harry Lime only to find that he’s dead — or is he? And as the supremely naive Cotten, a stranger in a strange land, descends through the levels of deception, and as he discovers his own friend’s corruption, the moral choices loom.
With its stunning Vienna locations, including the gigantic Prater ferris wheel and the dripping sewers, this is a triumph of Noir atmosphere, with its tilted camera angles (“to suggest that something crooked was going on” – director Carol Reed), its Robert Krasker-shot shadows, and Anton Karas’s unforgettable zither theme music.
THE THIRD MAN also features its stars in perhaps their most iconic roles: Trevor Howard at his British military best; Alida Valli, after her unsuccessful Hollywood period (Hitchcock’s The Paradine Case), here truly enigmatic and Garboesque; and Orson Welles’ Harry Lime, arriving on screen in one of the greatest star entrances ever, and adding the famous “cuckoo clock” speech to Graham Greene’s original script.
With the whole topped by its legendary, exquisitely drawn-out final shot (imposed by Reed over Greene’s original objections), THE THIRD MAN sits near the very top of the pantheon of films that define “classic."