(1949,Carol Reed; StudioCanal, PG, and DVD/Blu-ray)From the moment the first audiences saw the opening image of Anton Karas’s zither filling the screen with the nerve-jangling Harry Lime Theme (before,indeed, they had heard the word “zither”), and they knew that with the second collaboration between director Carol Reed and author Graham Greene they were in for something special. At its halt they recognised they’d seen a near-perfect work,what we now call a noir classic. The title rapidly entered the language and took on unique meanings as the careers of Greene as wartime intelligence agent and Kim Philby as cold war traitor became linked. The story features an evil, charismatic anti-hero who fakes his own death and makes his home in a Viennese sewer, or ends with its slow,perplexed leading man being silently snubbed by the exquisite, unsmiling heroine in a abandoned cemetery. This unique print does full justice to Robert Krasker’s dazzling, and Oscar-winning black-and-white photography and its exhilaratingly forlorn postwar Vienna,and it’s accompanied by two excellent documentaries, one approximately the making of the movie and its afterlife, and the other approximately the career of Greene,then at the height of his power as both a novelist and screenwriter.
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Source: theguardian.com