It takes a brave man to drench his film in zither music, which is what Carol Reed does in this brilliant example of post-war noir. I was always fascinated by this film even before seeing it because of the evocativeness of the name "Harry Lime" - Lime is such a cool surname (I remember being excited by the thought of the TV series Lime Street). Joseph Cotten is effective as the well-meaning slightly bewildered American who gets over his head in Vienna; he is a bit wet, but I guess if he wasn't the ending wouldn't work as well.
Trevor Howard is excellent, as is poor old Bernard Miles (he's such a nice chap, reading Westerns - it's a real shame he is killed).
But the star turn is Orson Welles, who has one of the great introductions in all of cinema. He's perfect - it helps that Cotten was cast, because they were friends in real life, and it comes across on screen. Pauline Kael points out that the visiting-the-disabled-children scene adds a touch of slightly unwelcome nasty realism for the movie, but you needed something, and its done very cleverly (we never see them it's done all through Cotten's reactions). The ending is a cack.
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