Holly has turned up at Baron Kurtz’s apartment, only to find that the shady Baron (slash-violinist at the Casanova Club) is joined by Dr. Winkel, the man whose name Holly could never pronounce. (After all, Holly’s only finally stopped calling Calloway “Callahan”; we shouldn’t expect him to start saying Vink-el any time soon.) Actually, Holly’s not looking for Kurtz or Winkel: he’s calling out Harry Lime…

We find Anna, again, in the clutches of the British military’s investigations, though this time she has been pulled in as a potential witness. Calloway begins his interrogation with a characteristically brusque interruption, “Now then, Miss Schmidt, I’m not interested in your forged papers – that’s purely a Russian case. When did you last see Lime?” With this vaguest hint of absolution with regards to…

At military headquarters, Anna is being ushered up a desolate staircase by a throng of officers as Holly spots her approaching. Anxiously, he tries to break through their protective entourage in order to divulge what she still does not know: Harry Lime is alive. “I’ve just seen a dead man walking!,” Holly says to her incredulously. “I saw him buried, and now I’ve seen him alive!” The uncanny thus…

In 1939, 10 years before the release of The Third Man and six months before the beginning of the war that would shape its setting,  papers were being signed that would change American cinema forever. Alfred Hitchcock was coming to Hollywood. At the time, his fame in England was frantic (newspapers were calling him “Alfred the Great”) and his international reputation was growing in leaps in bounds. A…

If film images act as the modern world’s hieroglyphics, then Still Dots 70 must clearly be the pictogram for sadness: from Robert Krasker’s silky black lighting to the neglected old-world beauty of Dario Simoni’s set decoration to Alida Valli’s spectral presence as Anna, this shot glimmers softly with heartache. Of course this impression is affirmed by what has come immediately beforehand…

Sight and Sound Magazine unveiled the highly anticipated results of their ambitious survey of the Top 50 Greateat Films of All Time last week with much hubbub. What started in 1952, and has been published every ten years since, has built into a critical mass of film glory that’s hard not to revel in. Tallying 846 top ten lists from critics worldwide representing votes for 2,045 different…

This frame marks a sea change in the character of Major Calloway, a man whose brusque and callous nature has painted him as Holly’s antagonist throughout this film. We have occupied Holly’s gaze for much of this film, seeing Calloway as a suit, a figure that stands for an authoritarian view of society. Calloway has been Holly’s personification of “the man,” even if he is a particularly friendly…

Once again, we can’t get through a Still Dots post without mentioning, at least briefly, Freud and the uncanny: a man thought dead has been found, not only alive but beaming a mischievous smirk, on the streets of Vienna. Has Harry Lime–who might be described as the personification of the Id, driven by the pleasure principle, unresponsive to the demands (or ethical interpretations) of reality–truly…

We have often brought up the topic of doppelgangers, doubling, and even quantum mechanics but today’s still brings us into another frame of reference. That of multiple dimensionality. Take a look, for instance, at last Thursday’s still: Here we are presented with a doubling or doppelganger again, in the form of the monolithic object around which our action circles. Holly has drunkenly pursued the…