Totally not a review of The Third Man

Obligatory:

Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Also obligatory:

On to more substantive materials.

I quite liked it.

At some point I will feel compelled enough to do a post that's nothing but comparisons between stuff in this film and stuff that The Living Daylights lifted from this film - by the way, if you like Daniel Craig but have never heard of Timothy Dalton, go watch The Living Daylights Right. Now.

I will say, however, that this film has a problem. It's the same problem as That Other Film What's Got Orson Welles In It That I Done Seen Oooh Okay Not Casino Royale 1967 Let Us Never Speak Of That One Again, and that's that the ending falls heavily into, um, It Was His Sled territory. And it's a bigger problem here than it was in Citizen Kane.

But more on that in a moment. There are a couple of things I want to praise this movie for.

1) the cinematography. Dear sweet lord, the cinematography is utterly stunning. Well-deserved Oscar on that one. In particular the wonderful chiaroscuro from The Reveal basically through the end of the film. A bit less so the sewer chase, which does drag a bit and - awkwardly, since it was actually filmed in real sewers - keeps looking like they're trying to pass off the same set as different locations. (Update: Ah, Orson Welles apparently refused to go down there, so any time you can see his face, it is a set.)  Still, Dutch Angles For Life.

2) Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. (It's not Kane and Leland, it's Harry and Holly.) Especially Orson Welles - who apparently wrote the cuckoo clock speech himself - but also Joseph Cotten. Oh, and that's Bernard Lee, the original M, as Sgt. Paine. Let me back up a second here. Orson Welles has about 10 minutes of screen time and is utterly enthralling in every second of it. Even when he's foofing around in the sewer at the end.

3) The Ferris wheel scene should be required watching at film school from here to kingdom come. Welles mesmerizingly, effortlessly, switches back and forth between Your Best Friend and Complete And Total Monster.

Hokai. SPLOILERS. (C'mon, it's The Third Man. You know this one already.)

"It was his sled" didn't really ruin Citizen Kane. Rosebud was what we call a McGuffin. It's a tool we use to move the story along. Sometimes they're relevant to the plot - cf. the Death Star plans in Star Wars - and sometimes, as in Citizen Kane, they're really not.

In contrast, "Harry Lime is still alive/Calloway is completely right" undermines a good chunk of the film's deconstructive intent.  It's a revelation at the heart of the story, rather than a throwaway gag at the end.

Still far more watchable than Citizen Kane, though. Even with the pervasive soundtrack dissonance.