Editing The Third Man (section)

==Reception==
The Grand Gala World Premiere of the film was held at the Ritz Cinema in [[Hastings]] on 1 September 1949.<ref name="Art & Hue"/>

===Box office===
''The Third Man'' was the most popular film at the British box office in 1949.<ref>{{cite news |url=http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article49700937 |title=TOPS AT HOME. |newspaper=[[The Courier-Mail]] |location=Brisbane |date=31 December 1949 |access-date=24 April 2012 |page=4 |publisher=National Library of Australia}}</ref>

According to ''[[Kinematograph Weekly]]'', the 'biggest winner' at the box office in 1949 Britain was ''The Third Man'', with "runners up" being ''[[Johnny Belinda (1948 film)|Johnny Belinda]]'', ''[[The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947 film)|The Secret Life of Walter Mitty]]'', ''[[The Paleface (1948 film)|The Paleface]]'', ''[[Scott of the Antarctic (film)|Scott of the Antarctic]]'', ''[[The Blue Lagoon (1949 film)|The Blue Lagoon]]'', ''[[Maytime in Mayfair]]'', ''[[Easter Parade (film)|Easter Parade]]'', ''[[Red River (1948 film)|Red River]],'' and ''[[I Was a Male War Bride]]''.<ref>{{cite book|page=232|title=Blackout : reinventing women for wartime British cinema|last=Lant|first= Antonia|year=1991 |publisher=Princeton University Press }}</ref>

===Critical response===
In Austria, "local critics were underwhelmed",<ref name=Cook>{{cite news|newspaper= The Guardian|title=The Third Man's view of Vienna|url= https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/dec/08/3|last=Cook|first=William|date=8 December 2006|access-date=15 August 2009}}</ref> and the film ran for only a few weeks. The Viennese [[Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna)|''Arbeiter-Zeitung'']], although critical of a "not-too-logical plot", praised the film's "masterful" depiction of a "time out of joint" and the city's atmosphere of "insecurity, poverty and post-war immorality".<ref>{{cite news|title=Kunst und Kultur. (…) Filme der Woche. Der dritte Mann|access-date=6 June 2012|newspaper=[[Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna)|Arbeiter-Zeitung]]|date=12 March 1950|url=http://www.arbeiter-zeitung.at/cgi-bin/az/flash.pl?seite=19500312_A07;html=1|location=Vienna|page=7|archive-date=17 June 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130617113752/http://www.arbeiter-zeitung.at/cgi-bin/az/flash.pl?seite=19500312_A07;html=1|url-status=dead}}</ref> William Cook, after his 2006 visit to Vienna's [[Third Man Museum]], wrote: "In Britain it's a thriller about friendship and betrayal. In Vienna it's a tragedy about Austria's troubled relationship with its past."<ref name=Cook/>

Some critics at the time criticised the film's [[Dutch angle]]s. [[C. A. Lejeune]] in ''The Observer'' described Reed's "habit of printing his scenes askew, with floors sloping at a diagonal and close-ups deliriously tilted" as "most distracting". Reed's friend [[William Wyler]] sent him a [[spirit level]] with a note stating: "Carol, next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera, will you?"<ref>[http://www.wellesnet.com/?p=172 Interview with Carol Reed from the book ''Encountering Directors'' by Charles Thomas Samuels (1972)] from wellesnet.com</ref>

Upon its release in Britain and America, the film received overwhelmingly positive reviews.<ref>"The Third Man was a huge box-office success both in Europe and America, a success that reflected great critical acclamation&nbsp;... The legendary French critic [[André Bazin]] was echoing widespread views when, in October 1949, he wrote of The Third Man's director: "Carol Reed&nbsp;... definitively proves himself to be the most brilliant of English directors and one of the foremost in the world." The positive critical reaction extended to all parts of the press, from popular daily newspapers to specialist film magazines, from niche consumer publications to the broadsheet establishment papers&nbsp;... Dissenting voices were very rare, but there were some. {{cite web |first=Rob |last=White |title=The Third Man – Critical Reception |publisher=Screenonline.org |url=http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/591618/index.html}}</ref> [[Time (magazine)|''Time'']] wrote that the film was "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."<ref name="time19500206">{{cite magazine | url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,811872,00.html | title=The New Pictures | magazine=Time | date=1950-02-06 | access-date=12 February 2015 | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100523042718/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,811872,00.html | archive-date=2010-05-23}}</ref> 

''[[The New York Times]]'' movie critic [[Bosley Crowther]] gave the film a mixed review, stating that the film:
<blockquote>
... for all the awesome hoopla it has received, is essentially a first-rate contrivance in the way of melodrama—and that's all. ... It doesn't present any 'message.' It hasn't a point of view. It is just a bang-up melodrama, designed to excite and entertain.
</blockquote>
Nonetheless he also described it as "an extraordinarily fascinating picture" and that: 
<blockquote>
[Reed] brilliantly packaged the whole bag of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre.<ref>{{cite news|title=The Screen in Review: ''The Third Man'', Carol Reed's Mystery-Thriller-Romance, Opens Run of Victoria|url= https://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A02E4DB1E39E43BBC4B53DFB466838B649EDE|last=Crowther|first=Bosley|author-link= Bosley Crowther|series=NYT Critics Pick|work=The New York Times|date=3 February 1950|access-date=15 August 2009}}</ref>
</blockquote>

A rare negative review came from the British communist newspaper ''[[Daily Worker (UK newspaper)|Daily Worker]]'', which complained that "no effort is spared to make the Soviet authorities as sinister and unsympathetic as possible."<ref>Quoted in the British Film Institute's [[Screenonline]] {{cite web |publisher=Screenonline.org |title=The Third Man – Critical Reception |first=Bob |last=White |url=http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/591618/index.html}}</ref>

Binx Bolling, the hero of [[Walker Percy]]'s ''[[The Moviegoer]]'', recalls:

{{Blockquote|Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments from their lives; the time they climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in ''Stagecoach'', and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in ''The Third Man''.<ref>{{cite book|author=Walker Percy|title=[[The Moviegoer]]| page=7}}</ref>}}

Roger Ebert wrote that "I remember the kitten in the doorway too. It was a rainy day in Paris in 1962, and I was visiting Europe for the first time. A little cinema on the [[Rive Gauche|Left Bank]] was showing ''The Third Man,'' and I went, into the humid cave of [[Gauloises|Gauloise]] smoke and perspiration, and saw the movie for the first time. When Welles made his entrance, I was lost to the movies."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Ebert |first=Roger |title=Roger Ebert's Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, The Finest Writing From a Century of Film |year=1997 |pages=14 |url=https://archive.org/stream/tolstoytotarantino/Roger%20Ebert%20-From%20Tolstoy%20to%20Tarantino%2C%20the%20Finest%20Writing%20From%20a%20Century%20of%20Film%281996%29_djvu.txt}}</ref> He 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."<ref>{{cite news |last=Ebert |first=Roger |date=8 December 1996 |title=The Third Man (1949) |work=[[Chicago Sun-Times]] |url=http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19961208/REVIEWS08/401010366/1023 |url-status=dead |access-date=2 January 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130324015429/http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=%2F19961208%2FREVIEWS08%2F401010366%2F1023 |archive-date=24 March 2013}}</ref> In a 1994 episode of ''Siskel & Ebert'', Ebert named Lime as his favourite film villain. [[Gene Siskel]] 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".{{Citation needed|date=August 2024}}

The film has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 80 reviews, with an average rating of 9.3/10 and the following consensus: "This atmospheric thriller is one of the undisputed masterpieces of cinema, and boasts iconic performances from Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles."<ref>{{cite web |title=The Third Man (1949) |url=https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the-third-man/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170108204238/https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the-third-man/ |archive-date=8 January 2017 |work=Rotten Tomatoes |access-date=12 December 2017 |url-status=dead }}</ref>

[[Akira Kurosawa]] cited ''The Third Man'' as one of his 100 favourite films.<ref name="farout">{{cite web |last=Thomas-Mason |first=Lee |title=From Stanley Kubrick to Martin Scorsese: Akira Kurosawa once named his top 100 favourite films of all time |url=https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/akira-kurosawa-100-favourite-films-list/ |website=Far Out Magazine |date=12 January 2021 |access-date=23 January 2023}}</ref>