Carol Reed's The Third Man is widely considered a masterpiece, and rightly so. It's a beautifully shot film that's ripe with atmosphere and rich in character development. Written by Graham Greene and starring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles, it's a post World War II drama that's aged wonderfully and doesn't feel dated by its setting at all.

When the film begins, the narrator laments having not seen Vienna before the war before explaining to us how the city is now divided and controlled by different factions - the French, the British, the Russians and the Americans. Into this odd mix of culture and post war politics emerges Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), a hard drinking writer of popular western novels who has arrived to meet with his friend, Harry Lime, with whom he went to college. When Martins turns up at Lime's home, however, the hired help tells him that his friend just passed away, the victim of an accident.

Martins heads to the nearest pub to drown his sorrows in drink where he meets a British officer, Calloway (Trevor Howard), who has no kind words about Martins' late friend and who tells him to go back to home but Holly isn't so sure that the circumstances surrounding his friend's death are as normal as they seem. He starts asking questions and doing a bit of investigating on his own and soon finds that many of the details conflict, leading him to believe that something is very wrong in Austria. If that weren't reason enough to stick around, Holly's also started to fall for a foxy blonde named Anna (Alida Valdi), who may also know more than she first seems to.

Shot on location in Austria while the country was still a shambles thanks to the war, The Third Man is an incredibly striking looking film thanks not only to the authentic locations but also to the deft cinematography of Robert Krasker. Large parts of the film are shot from rather odd angles, giving the whole film a disjointed look that suits the mystery of the central storyline quite well. The high contrast black and white works very nicely alongside the rather stark lighting employed to create a film with an incredibly unique look, one which is almost instantly identifiable, culminating in a remarkably tense chase sequence that pulls us through the sewers that line the underbelly of the city.

Performance wise, we're in very capable hands here with Cotton playing the crotchety Martins quite perfectly. He's got a worldliness to him and a weariness to him that fits the role very well and his interplay with the rest of the talented cast is completely believable. Welles, who is barely in the film, makes an incredible impression by the time he actually does show up, making the most out of his small but incredibly important part and carving out one of the finest, if briefest, performances of his storied career.

Video:

Lionsgate presents The Third Man in an AVC encoded 1.33.1 1080p high definition transfer that preserves the film's original aspect ratio. Compared to the previous edition, released in 2008 by The Criterion Collection (and now out of print), there's a fair bit more print damage and some evidence of digital noise reduction that has sucked out some of the grain and replaced it with some mild smearing. Black levels vary from scene to scene and sometimes fine detail gets lost in the shadows. Texture and detail are there in the close up shots and the image is generally fairly stable, but it's neither as clean looking, as detailed nor as well authored as the Blu-ray release that came before it. Based on its own merits, the transfer isn't horrible, but you can't help but compare it to the Criterion release and as soon as you do that the faults become a bit more obvious and the image quality more disappointing.