Welles’ finest hour in a film he didn’t helm came with this classic thriller, on which director Reed and writer Graham Greene reteamed. Novelist Joseph Cotten arrives in WWII-scarred Vienna to visit old friend Welles, but mystery envelops the elusive man. Anton Karas’ score fuses breathtakingly with Robert Krasker’s Oscar-winning cinematography. Memorable performances from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, and future 007 boss Bernard Lee.

Carol Reed’s The Third Man is undoubtedly peak British noir. After much discussion over the missing presumed dead Harry Lime, both fraught and admiring, Orson Welles shows up as the not-quite-departed with a powder keg of charisma that blows out the frame and a performance that electrifies. Be enveloped, as I was, by post-war Anglo-American Viennese intrigue and mesmerized by Welles’s as-large-as-cinema phantom.
– Diana Drumm, front of house staff