The Third Man (1949)

The high point of the Joseph Cotten season may be one of the most famous motion pictures of all time.

The Third Man (1949) is a milestone classic film noir Carol Reed and Alexander Korda and Graham Greene collaborative drama of post-war Trümmerfilm and unconventional romance while also being an unconventional thriller of confused ethics in a devastated world-themed zither-thou-goest intrigue in partitioned post-war Vienna multiply layered writer hero voiceover contraband underground mainstream masterpiece of collaboration and all time cinema favourite, indeed in 1999, the British Film Institute voted The Third Man the greatest British film of all time, while later in time, after long mature reflection, in 2011, a poll for Time Out ranked it the second-best British film ever; and starring Joseph Cotten, Du kannst darauf wetten, dass er es ist!, and Alida Valli and Orson Welles, with Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, and some cats in film noir also for completeness of theme.

Night Train to Munich (1940)

Night Train to Munich (1940) is a Carol Reed wartime sticky wicket concentration camp train and mountain and foreign territory based super anti-Nazi Alfred Hitchcock-influenced spy thriller by the mighty Carol Reed and starring Rex Harrison, Margaret Lockwood and Paul Henreid, and written by Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder, and itself derived from Gordon Wellesley’s 1939 tale “Report on a Fugitive,” which charts the perilous tribulations of a brilliant inventor and his devoted daughter, both spirited away by the Gestapo in the ominous shadow of the Nazi incursion into Prague on the very brink of global conflagration, while into this treacherous milieu steps a resourceful operative of His Majesty’s Secret Service, who insinuates himself into the upper echelons of the German military machine, assuming the guise of a senior officer and feigning amorous interest in the young woman, all in the delicate hope of luring her and her invaluable father from the tightening coils of the Nazi embrace.

The Man Between (1953)

The Man Between (1953) is a post war Cold War Trümmerfilm-styled Carol Reed espionage and defection and rebuilding of German and Europe The Third Man style Cold War thriller film noir starring James Mason, Claire Bloom and the queen of Cold War Euro noir cinema, Hildegard Knef. 

Carol Reed's The Man Between (1953) is a sure fire melancholic echo of his earlier triumphs, a film of shadows, silences, and moral indecision, set amidst the frost-bitten rubble of postwar Berlin. A lot of snow went into the making of this cold Cold War thriller.

The Fallen Idol (1948)

The Fallen Idol (1948) is a child's-view psychological mystery Limey classic film noir thriller which delights in a great script, a fascinating and compelling story, top drawer acting from the very best of the age, and is a general talent-mix of both Carol Reed and Graham Green, both at their cinematic best.

The eyes of a child are untrained in perceiving the grey between the morality of black and white. It is on this precarious naivety of youth that Carol Reed hangs the suspense of The Fallen Idol.

Reed, in collaboration with novelist and screenwriter Graham Greene, crafted The Fallen Idol a year before their masterpiece The Third Man. While The Fallen Idol might seem to suggest adolescent growing pains, your assumptions deceive you. The film is nearly as much a noir classic as Reed's Odd Man Out and The Third Man, which bookend it in his all-too-classic none-too-shabby all-so-awesome filmography.

Odd Man Out (1947)

Odd Man Out (1947) by Carol Reed and starring James Mason is a classic British film noir set largely on the streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland, following one man's episodic flight in the night, as he evades the law, while partially aided in his delirious and wounded state, by a variety of comrades, sympathetic locals and other colourful characters.

The noir chops of this outstanding thriller are evident first in the central character of Johnny McQueen, who is a sympathetic villain — almost a double villain if this is a permissible description.

As a handsome and wounded hero pulling off a passable Irish accent, James Mason is fully sympathetic despite his being both an armed robber and a terrorist — the latter at least in the eyes of the state.

The noir feel is further evident in the photography which is stunning in its use of shadows and light on the streets, corners and alleyways. These in fact do presage the similar, more famous and more elaborate work done by Carol Reed in the film The Third Man (1949), which was filmed two years later than this.