To go down in history as one of the best films ever made, it is not always necessary to harvest many awards. Sometimes only time will grant some feature films the recognition they have always deserved. This is the case of The Third Man (1949), a true legend of film noir, which went rather unnoticed at the Oscars.

Directed by the British filmmaker Carol Reed (Oliver, The Fallen Idol), the film is set in the city of Vienna in 1947, when the Cold War had just begun. The American Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a mediocre Western novel writer, arrives in the Austrian capital when the city is divided into four zones occupied by the allied powers of World War II.

Holly goes to visit Harry Lime (Orson Welles), a childhood friend who has promised him a job. But his arrival coincides with Harry's funeral, who has died after being run over by a car in the middle of the street. The head of the British military police informs Martins that Lime was heavily involved in the black market. But Martins notices a discrepancy: everyone says they saw two men at the scene of the accident trying to help Lime, but a witness claims to have seen a third man.

As it happened with other productions of the same decade, The Third Man was and still is a hugely influential film, not only for its aesthetic resources -among which stands out an impressive black-and-white photography- but also for its narrative, the cast's performance, and the tension generated in the atmosphere.

These elements have managed to endure from those years to this day, easily found in any respectable espionage thriller. However, the fact that they were present in a film from the late forties is worth recognizing, because it gave the film freshness and boldness for the time. Perhaps that's why it was so influential then and has inspired so many films in recent years.

The premiere of The Third Man when only four years had passed since the end of World War II marked the beginning of a new wave in British cinema, which began to be permeated by the general disenchantment of the time. One conflict had ended, but the world was still immersed in a war.

Undoubtedly, The Third Man is one of the best films in the history of cinema and it came at a crucial moment, when film noir was in good health, or enough to give rise to innovation. Out of the three Oscar nominations, it barely received the one for Best Cinematography, but this didn't stop filmmakers from all over the world from looking to the film for inspiration to keep creating to this day.

*This article has been automatically translated using artificial intelligence