event
The Third Man
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Mon Mar 22
7:30 pm
The Third Man at Fredric March Play Circle
A sharp, exciting thriller that beautifully captures a dispirited Europe nowhere near recovered from WWII, Carol Reed’s The Third Man is one of those miraculous films that work on every level. Written by Graham Greene, it stars Joseph Cotten as an American writer of cowboy stories who, with a head full of idealism, travels to Vienna to take a job offer from old friend Orson Welles. Once there, he finds that Welles has been killed, but suspects things aren’t quite as they seem. The film’s two most memorable elements are also those most confined to the background: Welles and post-war Vienna itself, the former a conjunction of impishness and evil, the latter the sort of arena in which such characters thrive by exploiting human weakness with no greater ideology in mind than the bottom line.
Fredric March Play Circle 800 Langdon St., Madison, WI
A sharp, exciting thriller that beautifully captures a dispirited Europe nowhere near recovered from WWII, Carol Reed’s The Third Man is one of those miraculous films that work on every level. Written by Graham Greene, it stars Joseph Cotten as an American writer of cowboy stories who, with a head full of idealism, travels to Vienna to take a job offer from old friend Orson Welles. Once there, he finds that Welles has been killed, but suspects things aren’t quite as they seem. The film’s two most memorable elements are also those most confined to the background: Welles and post-war Vienna itself, the former a conjunction of impishness and evil, the latter the sort of arena in which such characters thrive by exploiting human weakness with no greater ideology in mind than the bottom line.
Updated 03/22/2010
