The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
77. 1949 - The Third Man
Honourable Mentions: The Heiress,Kind Hearts and Coronets, White Heat
The greatest British film of all time, Carol Reed's The Third Man is an unrivalled piece of early Cold War cinema - a discombobulating descent through post-war Vienna made even more dizzying by the expressionistic cinematography of Robert Krasker and an undulating, zither-based score by Anton Karas.
But it isn't just the audio-visual qualities of The Third Man that make it so special. On top of boasting a never-better Orson Welles as the presumed-deceased Harry Lime, Reed's film is imbued with a sardonic sense of anger and betrayal, that out of the rubble of one war has emerged another less destructive but even more absurd, and populated by self-interested figures like Lime who are content to profit from the disorder that it brings.
At the centre of the story is Joseph Cotton's Holly Martins, a pulp western author who, imitating the cowboys of his stories, enters Vienna half-cocked and out of his depth as he tries to unravel the mystery of Lime's disappearance, all while the British security services, led by Trevor Howard's Major Calloway, attempt to educate Martins as they continue their own investigation.
Suspenseful and playful in a great many ways, Reed's film also packs a big enough third-act punch that cements it as the greatest film noir ever made.