Third Rating

I recently decided to try another one of the "classics," The Third Man. It's the story of a stranger in Vienna trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious car accident that resulted in the death of his friend. It's also a vintage 1949 film-noir in the IMDB top 250, the AFI 100, and loads of other top film lists.

From a visual perspective, it's easy to see why. This movie looks fantastic, in a way that amazingly still holds up today, 60 years later. If someone today tried to make a black-and-white, moody film with visual scope and dramatic lighting, they'd try to make it look like this, and would be lucky to do half as well. It's all the more impressive, knowing that with visual effects being nearly non-existent at the time (by today's standards), nearly all of what you're seeing is actually being captured in camera -- and is somehow framed and lit in a way to accomplish that.

But in every other respect... well, I think this movie told me what I really should have already known -- these sorts of film-noirs aren't for me. I found the movie to have a tedious pace, frustratingly slow for what is at its core a mystery. Things should be tense and suspenseful, but it feels like ages between the moments when "stuff happens."

With the exception of Orson Welles, who manages to impress in his handful of scenes, most of the acting is of the heightened and fakey variety that seems to mark films made before a certain year. They're performances pitched at a level that suggests the actors actually have to punch through the screen to be there in your living room (or movie theater) acting right at you.

To my sensibilities, The Third Man feels much more like a piece of art than a movie -- something that should be appreciated on a purely aesthetic level. And I sometimes think that for these "top film list" makers, that alone is enough. They see "film as art," and if a film has enough artistic merit, that makes it unassailably good. For me it just "looks great, but has a lousy personality." I rate The Third Man a D+.