“The Third Man,” September 2

Wednesday, September 3, 6 p.m.

The Last Picture House, 325 East Second Street, Davenport IA

With the first offering in its series voted "the greatest British film of all time" in a 1999 British Film Institute poll, the German American Heritage Center opens its “The Lost Years of German Cinema: 1948-1963" film screenings with one of the greatest cinematic works of all time, as director Carol Reed's 1949 film noir The Third Man will be shown at Davenport's The Last Picture House on September 2.

In Reed's and screenwriter Graham Greene's The Third Man, out-of-work pulp fiction novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in a post-war Vienna divided into sectors by the victorious allies, where a shortage of supplies has led to a flourishing black market. He arrives at the invitation of ex-school friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has offered him a job, only to discover that Lime has recently died in a peculiar traffic accident. From talking to Lime's friends and associates, however, Martins soon notices that some of the stories are inconsistent and determines to discover what really happened to Harry. He also finds himself becoming increasingly infatuated with Lime's girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), a woman with secrets of her own.

Upon its 1949 release in Britain and America, The Third Man received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with Time magazine calling the film "crammed with cinematic plums that would do the early Hitchcock proud—ingenious twists and turns of plot, subtle detail, full-bodied bit characters, atmospheric backgrounds that become an intrinsic part of the story, a deft commingling of the sinister with the ludicrous, the casual with the bizarre."

Legendary critic Roger Ebert, meanwhile, frequently wrote and spoke about the movie's power. In 1997, he wrote: "It was a rainy day in Paris in 1962, and I was visiting Europe for the first time. A little cinema on the Left Bank was showing The Third Man, and I went, into the humid cave of Gauloise smoke and perspiration, and saw the movie for the first time. When Welles made his entrance, I was lost to the movies." Ebert added it to his canon of "Great Movies" and wrote, "Of all the movies that I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies." In a 1994 episode of Siskel & Ebert, Ebert named Lime as his all-time-favorite film villain. Gene Siskel, meanwhile, remarked that The Third Man was an "exemplary piece of moviemaking, highlighting the ruins of World War II and juxtaposing it with the characters' own damaged histories."

The Third Man will be shown at Davenport's The Last Picture House on September 2 at 6 p.m., the screening followed by a post-film discussion with Dr. Matthew Coomber, and guests are asked to check in at the German American Heritage Center table in the lobby. Admission is $12-15, guests will choose their seats upon arrival, and proceeds from ticket sales will go to Heritage Center programming For more information, call (563)322-8844 and visit GAHC.com.