(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 moment collaboration between director Carol Reed and author Graham Greene they were in for something special. At its end 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 recent 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 domestic in a Viennese sewer, and ends with its dull,perplexed leading man being silently snubbed by the aesthetic, unsmiling heroine in a deserted cemetery. This recent 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 film 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