What lurks beyond the open door? The porter points his thumb in the direction of the ominously half-closed passageway, the threshold between one space and the next, made unsettling by its visual inaccessibility. In this way, doors and windows act as stand-ins for the cinematic screen itself, a rectangle/square (depending on the aspect ratio) that offers a limited vantage point into a separate…

A man leans or the camera leans, it’s hard to tell which, and a question is weighed. The porter’s ponderous expression is likely connected to his grasp of English, as he tries to put his story into words Holly can understand. But he has much more than that to ponder. At about this instant, the  trembling zither soundtrack has dropped suddenly, leaving us in a Vienna we have not really interacted…

Another canted frame (which we’ll see plenty more of throughout The Third Man) as Holly Martins re-questions Harry’s former porter, who heard (but did not see) the car accident that allegedly killed Harry. As Jeremy mentioned, the circumstances surrounding Harry’s death are becoming increasingly suspicious, even while the pieces are beginning to fall into place. Thanks to the porter’s candid…

Since we last looked at the situation a couple of notable facts have come to light.  From Anna, Holly learns that in Harry’s last dying moments he made plans not only for Holly, but for Anna as well. Also from Anna, Holly hears that Doctor Winkel, Harry’s own doctor, happened to be passing by the scene and was able to tend to Harry as he died. Thirdly, Holly discovers that the driver of the truck…

The forging of a new relationship, frozen in time: the expressions on both Holly’s and Anna’s faces, crystallized as they are for our analysis, seem to etch these characters’ emotions into fleshy stone. (After all, aren’t cinematic stills sculptures in light, as petrified and revealing as, say, the emphatic strength exhibited by Michelangelo’s David?) As much as both Holly and Anna may be playing…

The Anna Schmidt we see before us now is one in transition; the dolled-up blonde fluttering her false eyelashes at the camera is all but gone. Her relatively seamless blonde wig is left as a crumpled rodent-like mass on her vanity and in seconds a closer shot will show Anna removing her large eyelashes, the last vestige of the character she has been performing. But this is of course not only…

In the spirit of the Walker’s new Death Metal Logo T-shirt, we’d like to introduce you to your new rock ‘n’ roll wardrobe: Hungarian filmmaking legend, Béla Tarr is known for his extremely long takes and slow-moving camera, but Black Flag made short fast songs. This punk legend made a huge impact, and was even covered by indie-rock wunderkinds Dirty Projectors for an entire album. Tarr has a long…

Today’s still has captured Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), former lover of Harry Lime, at her most bewitching: meeting Holly Martins in her dressing room after a show at the Josefstadt Theater, Anna is both skeptical and intrigued, guarded yet increasingly frank. In other words, she’s somewhere between the role that she plays in the German-language comedy that Holly has just walked out of—we only see…

This moment, one of our first sights of Anna Schmidt, shows her dolled up in a bizarre German comedy. The camera swings left following the frenzied German dialogue which has the audience (except for Holly) in stitches. Holly still feels a stranger in a strange land, looking around uncomfortably at the cackling audience. Like a non-German movie theater audience, Holly can see little of the humor in…