Carol Reed
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The Good German (2006)
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
influenced by The Third Man (1949)
Characters Visuals Plot Themes
He may seem wised-up, but he's as callow as the Joseph Cotten character in "The Third Man," which was set in labyrinthine postwar Vienna.
By contrast, Soderbergh's reality is old movies -- some of us can sympathize with that -- and so he filters this tale of murder, naïveté, and betrayal through "The Third Man" and Billy Wilder's "A Foreign Affair."
Based on Joseph Kanon's novel , The Good German echoes the setting of The Third Man and the central relationship of Casablanca.
George Clooney and Cate Blanchett bring star glamor to bombed-out 1945 Berlin, and stock footage of the destroyed city blends in nicely to create a film that wants to exist in an ahistorical space somewhere between The Third Man, Judgment at Nuremberg, and Casablanca.
You can ignore the behind-the-scenes technicalities and enjoy the movie on face value: as a moderately entertaining nod to “Casablanca” and “The Third Man.”
It doesn't take a USC cinema scholar to observe that "German" is big, fat, wet kiss to filmdom of the 1940s; more specifically to such immortal pictures as "Casablanca" and "The Third Man." Soderbergh pushes "German" to not only emulate the mood of these classics, but the actual cinematic style as well.
True, it still doesn’t make “The Third Man” as great as history remembers it, but without Carol Reed's classic 1949 noir, we wouldn’t have films like “ Chinatown ” or “ The Departed ."
He adds impish visual touches such as silent movie-style iris shots, as well as cuts and compositions recalling "The Third Man" and "Psycho."
The aforementioned scene, the use of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (significantly, from their Let It Bleed album), the reference to the Stones' Exile on Main Street, the evocation of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), the nod to the "X" imagery from Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932), etc. these give the film its tone, its feeling, its weightiness quite apart from their more overt symbolic value.
Another, deftly borrowed from The Third Man, simply involves Madolyn walking past Colin at a funeral, her impassive gaze deadlier than a speeding bullet.
The aforementioned scene, the use of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (significantly, from their Let It Bleed album), the reference to the Stones' Exile on Main Street, the evocation of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), the nod to the "X" imagery from Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932), etc. ?
He loves to toss into "The Departed" a homage to a film like "The Third Man," to give audiences a reference point about things that please him.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by Night Train to Munich (1940), The Third Man (1949)
Visuals Music
The references are multitudinous, and come from everywhere (one of my favorites is a cable car sequence nodding to Carol Reed's 1940 thriller "Night Train To Munich").
His favorite is a reference to Night Train To Munich .
The scenes set aboard the funicular railway resemble the climax of Carol Reed's "Night Train to Munich."
I guess the composer must have seen “The Third Man” somewhere along the way.
As the zither from “The Third Man” plays in the background, the plot jells around a priceless Renaissance painting left to Gustave by a deceased dowager countess (Tilda Swinton in old-age makeup), Gustave’s quest to take possession of the painting and prove himself innocent of his benefactress’ murder, and, of course, medieval sewers.
This image—snowy Mitteleuropa as an ornate playland offering one last pell-mell ride as it melts away—suggests The Third Man's Ferris wheel sequence with a dash of Rube Goldberg, or Nabokov scripting a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
The camerawork has the chiaroscuro seediness of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), and for his plot Petzold mines everything from Dark Passage, a 1947 Humphrey Bogart noir about a wrongly accused convict who escapes from prison and undergoes plastic surgery in order to track down his wife’s real killer, to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
In fact, Phoenix is reminiscent of Carol Reed’s The Third Man in its narrative style and its use of music.
It’s a kind of post-war neo-noir with elements of Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair , Carol Reed’s The Third Man , and Hitchcock’s Vertigo — without ever leaning too heavily on any of these, owing to the themes of the story.
Visually and narratively, Phoenix is a pastiche of classic noirs (drawing heavily from The Third Man ), Rubble Films, and 50s melodramas.
With its swampy air of unease and the figure of the enigmatic missing man, the key to the story as it were, “Azor” vaguely evokes films like Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (written by Graham Greene), though without the narrative pulse and concerns or Hollywood glamour of that cloak-and-dagger thriller.
Still, as we count up the mysterious off-camera figures in it — Keys, a rival banker Lutz and the sinister name scribbled on a note left by Keys, the soldier Lazaro — one can’t help but be reminded of “The Third Man” and think Fontana neglects the core mystery and leaves the stakes entirely too low, or at least removed from this world of money and connections.
Whether we ever encounter Keys I shall not reveal; what matters, in any case, is that we feel we know him, because—as with Harry Lime, in “The Third Man” (1949)—his absence becomes a kind of all-pervading presence.
In this respect, it’s tempting to think of Keys — clearly a cunning individual who nurtured the intimacies his job afforded — as an absence/presence in the mold of Harry Lime in the noir classic “The Third Man.”
Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)
Directed by Christopher McQuarrie
influenced by The Third Man (1949)
Themes Visuals
While Rogue Nation nodded to Casablanca , here McQuarrie pays tribute to the subterranean scramble of The Third Man , another European-set thriller of reversals and betrayals and cracked moral worldviews.
Even in Fallout, the entire second act seems structured as an elaborate homage to the France of Carol Reed’s The Third Man.
This is the most film-literate Bond movie yet in terms of its borrowings—the secret society Spectre holds its meetings in the same kind of palace as we saw in Eyes Wide Shut , and at one point, Seydoux’s moody exit in a trench coat puts you irresistibly in mind of Alida Valli in The Third Man .
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
Directed by Joe Johnston
influenced by Night Train to Munich (1940)
Visuals
The action sequences recall everything from Carol Reed 's "Night Train to Munich," in scenes involving derring-do in the Alps, to Alfred Hitchcock 's "Foreign Correspondent," as in the climactic air battle pitting America Himself against the Red Skull high over the Atlantic.
More accessible than last year’s admirable, but headache-inducing “Moulin Rouge,” “Chicago” is the New Musical of the 21st Century that we’ve all been waiting for, and it’s well on it’s way to becoming the first musical to win a Best Picture Oscar since 1968’s “Oliver!”
Well, if "Oliver!" could win in 1968, certainly "Chicago" deserves its accolades.
On Oscar night back in 2003, it walked away with six Oscars, including the top prize of Best Picture, becoming the first musical to do so since “Oliver!” over three decades earlier.
And certain plot elements owe too much to early Hitchcock for the film to be considered a true original: the sequence in which Holly is forced to deliver an impromptu speech is entertaining as all hell, but its also lifted from The 39 Steps.
Those who toil in the netherworld, in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927), are seen en masse, trudging with leaden gait toward their appointed tasks—a slog recalled at the start of Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” (1968), as the ranks of orphans descend to their daily gruel.
Mason delivers a sterling performance as the suffering fugitive, trying to reach safety even as he suspects his time is almost at an end — it's an especially interesting turn because his character is too often in pain to even grasp the actions of those around him, among them a pair of helpful nurses, a neutral bartender and groups of children play-acting as Johnny and the cops (their admiration recalls that of the Dead End Kids for James Cagney's Rocky Sullivan in 1938's Angels with Dirty Faces).
Harry, driven the other way, styles himself an elegant, suave villain, but he’s really a squalid little opportunist (Welles as seen in The Third Man is “the most hideous man alive” used by the girls in Heavenly Creatures as their imaginary kingdom’s hideously sexy villain), and he closes things out in an appropriate place.
His direction impresses, with some fine camera moves, flashy hand-held sequences, and even a touch of playful dutch-angled homage to The Third Man (the movie the girls go see, before being chased by Orson Welles/Harry Lime).
Jackson visualizes their fantasy worlds, from a land of giant flowers and butterflies to a black-and-white Orson Welles chasing them after a screening of The Third Man.
You have to give Koepp credit for even attempting to wrestle Brown’s tome into some sort of respectability; he fails, but rarely abjectly (there’s an exception in the brief clip in which Zobrist enthuses about the Black Death bringing about the Renaissance—which seems a crude attempt to recall Orson Welles’ famous speech about Switzerland and Italy from “The Third Man”).
Moving elegantly from its golden-hued first hour in French Morocco to a bombed out—but no less postcard pretty—wartime England, Allied evokes imagery like an expensive mausoleum of the silver screen, from the obvious callbacks to Casablanca to David Lean, the Archers and Carol Reed’s The Third Man , gliding through high-tech recreations of classic wartime movie tropes filtered through Zemeckis’ gifted eye for composition.
He reminds me, early in the film, of Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins in the movie of Graham Greene’s The Third Man, if Holly cynically teamed up with Orson Welles’s Harry Lime in profiteering via diluted drugs.
The Constant Gardener (2005)
Directed by Fernando Meirelles
influenced by The Third Man (1949)
Plot Themes
Ralph Fiennes stars as a mild-mannered member of the British High Commission in Kenya whose radical activist wife (Rachel Weisz) is brutally slain; investigating her murder, he gradually pieces together a tale of corruption involving the pharmaceutical industry that's every bit as horrific as (and much more timely than) Harry Lime's killing of babies with diluted penicillin in The Third Man.
It was the classic The Third Man that showed that such films succeed by relying on well-defined, intriguing characters who drive the story so that message (in that case, the evil of black-market drug dealing in post-war Vienna) simmers in a back seat.
Fiennes proves why he’s one of Hollywood’s best, Weisz earns that Oscar nomination, and Merielles gives some utterly amazing direction in a truly worthy successor to “The Third Man” with a sad, taut, and excellent global mystery.
When I was a kid I saw both David Lean's " Oliver Twist " and Carol Reed's " Oliver!
The deserted island town is out of The Twilight Zone: A theater marquee advertises The Third Man (1949), yet there also is a USA TODAY box.
In Mindhunters, a few of the FBI's finest criminal profilers-in-training congregate for one last test under the Al-Pacino-in- The Recruit tutelage of crackpot Harris (Val Kilmer) at a remote military facility that's home to a phantom cinema where The Third Man plays on an eternal loop.
Cruella (2021)
Directed by Craig Gillespie
influenced by Oliver! (1968), The Third Man (1949)
Visuals
The sets here are impressively realized, especially Thompson’s sterile fashion house, designed with a cold, clinical precision that contrasts well with the Carol Reed-like collapsing brick building that Cruella and her pals transform into a bohemian home (I can imagine the look of Oliver! informing a lot of the design choices made there).
What follows is a mixture between the musical Oliver! and The Devil Wears Prada .
That's not really a problem after considering that Orson Welles played the eerily amoral Harry Lime in "The Third Man" but played him as a likable rogue in a popular radio series later.