Tim Brayton, the author of the film blog Antagony & Ecstasy, has been counting down his 115 Best Films of All Time - a number he realizes is arbitrary and a task that is entirely subjective. Brayton has reached #16 and one my favorite films, Carol Reed’s The Third Man. He writes:
Probably not the most cynical film ever made (it’s far too much fun to watch for that to be the case), but it’s hard to think of another great movie that’s this morally curdled. Much of that comes from Orson Welles’s portrayal of a man with not a single redeeming virtue, played with such ebullient Wellesian charisma that we’re powerless to resist falling in love with him, and only realise afterward what horrible thing we’ve just done. Mostly, though, it comes from filming in the actual Vienna that was actually turned into a wasteland by war and politics, and it’s hard to say which one had the more deleterious effect. One of the greatest expressions in any medium of the shell-shocked nihilism found every after WWII, the film expresses both visually and narratively a colossally dysfunctional world of rubble and bent perspective, a world where nothing seems right anymore.
Well said. I heartily recommend the blog generally and going back and reviewing Brayton’s list of films. It’s varied and unconventional, and I’m almost certain you will have not seen many of the films — there’s much fodder for the NetFlix queue.
Begin with the introduction, which explains the 115 number and lays out some interesting and wonderfully arbitrary ground rules.
