I just watched _The Third Man_ in full for the first time

I like where this thread ended up.

So anyway I got the two disc edition for Xmas and I just rewatched the movie for the first time since, well, since I started this thread. There was something that grabbed me in the first few minutes this time through that I don't think I'd mentioned on here yet but now it's slipped my mind...it'll come back. I think.

the Criterion set reports in a couple places (Soderbergh-Gilroy commentary) that Reed was able to shoot round-the-clock cuz of Benzedrine.

Seems kinda petty if not downright weird, but I lost some of my love for this movie after learning that Welles refused to go into the sewers (except for a little).

This is the only current serious candidate for the position of 'my favourite film ever'.

yes, Welles was quite the diva.

I just watched Lady from Shanghai, and it was weird watching him try to play a tough guy.

It's a distanced tough guy (equally distantly Irish).

distantly Irish because he spoke like the Lucky Charms leprechaun?

so many things about lady from shanghai are weird and off-key, but in a way that's what i like about it.

yes, it's a wacky noir nightmare!

and The Third Man would be unthinkable w/out it (and the earlier Welles films).

"I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm."

My favourite film.

Did Spongebob rip off the score, or is it just me?

I think my favorite visual from this was when the cop was like "WWII general would keep their enemies portraits on the wall" and it shows the two photos of Harry Lime in his file, looking like the most gleeful/dangerous/crazy man in existence.

Hmm yeah, that watery zither is quite Spongebobesque, isn't it? One of my favourite scores ever.

plus, they used to show us bits of the flick in film class. as the prof noted, "watch how the screen tilts. everytime the frame is tilted like that, someone is lying to Holly."
― Kingfish Beatbox (Kingfish), Thursday, February 19, 2004 3:56 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark

aw I wish I hadn't read this. the cinematography in this is so incredible, the tilted frames. winogrand eat yer heart out

I haven't got a sensible name, Calloway.

So did anyone know about this?

“After one year and 102 blog posts containing a collective 125,000 words, our Still Dots project was complete,” write Matt Levine and Jeremy Meckler at the Walker Art Center. “Since December 13, 2011, we’d been pulling one frame from every 62 seconds of screen time in Carol Reed‘s remarkable film The Third Man and, twice per week, writing an in-depth analysis of it…. Our analyses related to specific frames, either discussing the narrative or characters at that particular point in the film’s chronology, dissecting the mysterious visual factors that conspire to create The Third Man‘s shadowy environs, or taking wild flights of fancy based on the particularities of that frozen moment. Through our project we tied in serious thinkers and authors (from Freud to Marx, Sontag to Dostoyevsky, Einstein to Eisenstein), various films (anything from The War Game to Star Wars), and other aspects of contemporary culture (superhero comics, Looney Tunes, Mad Men, and The Wire), to name a few. Still Dots was inspired largely by Roland Barthes, who in his famous 1970 essay ‘The Third Meaning‘ considers film stills as separate from both film (since they lack the illusion of movement) and photography (since they are not photographs so much as evidence of that flickering illusion that they constitute).”

http://blogs.walkerart.org/filmvideo/category/still-dots/

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-the-third-man-all-year-long

on re-watching, imo the best welles moment is cosily deciding not to throw cotton out the big wheel after all old man

Our man in havana doesnt even approach this, someone upthread on crack

we dug up your coffin.

and found harbin?

[nod]

...pity.

as if i'd do anything to you. or you to me! you're just a little mixed up about things in general.

listen, i'd like to cut you in, old man. there's no one left in vienna i can really trust, and we've always done everything together. if you do want in i'll meet you any place, any time. but when we do meet, old man, it's you i want to see. not the police. you'll remember that, won't you?

Free of income tax, old man!

the other day someone wrote into a tumblr i haven't updated in years asking a question about this movie

I still do believe in God, old
man... I believe in God and Mercy
and all that... The dead are
happier dead. They don't miss much
here...

CAMERA PANS RL with him as he moves slightly still, looking
off L, and starts to idly write on the window at his side -
out of picture.

CLOSE SHOT - THE WINDOW

Wheel turning over scene. Harry's hand in picture from CR -
he has drawn on the steamed-up window a heart with an arrow
through it. He is writing the word ANNA above it.

HARRY (O.S.)
...poor devils.

actually i think my favorite is the dead are happier dead. they don't miss much here, poor devils. [taps anna's name.] what do you believe in?

ha!

oh holly, if you do get anna out of this, be kind to her; you'll find she's worth it. i wish i had asked you to bring some of those tablets from home.

just gonna keep posting in here endlessly it's darraghmac's fault

best bits of supporting business: baron kurtz's coyness about his gig at the casanova club ("one has to make a living somehow"); crabbin the aged propagandist hustling a rotating series of girls through doors and up stairs; popescu the ultracivilized romanian psychopath ("no ice for mr. martins!"); and of course poor innocent MAJOR PAYNE (played by the pre-dench M!) with his rhinoceros slide. lime sheds the blood of the lamb there.

no wait he's not major payne he's sergeant or something. just as well.

must you take those?

they'll be returned, miss.

they're private letters.

that's all right, miss; don't worry. we're used to it. like doctors.

i think, in this movie, there's a bit character in maybe the opening third of the movie, working in a ceiling lit office room, who wears a pair of glasses with sharply edged, perfectly trapezoidal frames. i have been searching for that exact pair of glasses for about 8 years now

the story of dayo's glasses will be 1/5th or so of my room 237-style exegesis of the third man

Prob the russian attache guy?

clnl pickering pwns in this too, oh i forgot m'hat