The Third Man
Copresented by the Hammer Museum and the UCLA Film & Television Archive
Joan Didion counted Carol Reed’s tenebrous thriller, about a writer investigating the suspicious circumstances of a friend’s death in postwar Vienna, among her favorites. “It works at every level in a very clean economical way,” she once explained. “Anyone writing for the screen could learn a lot from the penicillin montage—it gives you the plot in a very short amount of screen time, yet when you actually analyze it, there are no details. Just images.”
(1949, dir. Carol Reed, 35mm, black & white, 93 min.)