The Third Man, here reissued on the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary, was the highest placed British film in the most recent Sight and Sound Greatest Films list. Director Carol Reed’s gripping adaptation of a script by author Graham Greene sees American pulp novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) travelling to Allied-occupied Vienna to take on a job offered to him by his old school friend, Harry Lime, portrayed by a charmingly Mephistophelean Orson Welles performing some of his most celebrated dialogue. Arriving to find that Lime has been declared dead days before, and confronted with conflicting stories about the man he knew, even idealised, Martins’s suspicions are raised. He sets out to discover the truth behind his friend’s death, and the truth about his friend, discovering that nothing is what it seems in Reed’s enduring tale of betrayal and corruption.

There will be Open Captioned screenings at 13.20 on Monday 9th, and 20.50 on Wednesday 11th.

Notes by Kevin Coyne