This film transports you to a time and place in history that no longer exists: post-war Vienna. Shot on location in the very streets and bombed out buildings with rubble strewn about, it can feel like documentary footage. There's a real authenticity to it while the espionage noir flavor is cranked to the highest level. I don't think any film has managed to convey the old Europe atmosphere of a city like this until In Bruges. Quite remarkable too is how the film introduces characters and builds up a mystery about what happened to this "Harry Lime" figure everyone knows. Joseph Cotten is just an American writer of westerns who came to Vienna to find Lime because he offered him a job. Cotten instead winds up on a detective hunt when the people he meets to discuss Lime's whereabouts—a British military police sergeant (Trevor Howard), Lime's girlfriend (Alida Valli), and other memorable Viennese residents—present a confusing and inconsistent narrative of what happened when Lime was supposedly killed crossing the street.

About half way into the picture we finally meet Harry played with panache and charm by Orson Welles. It is the most iconic and memorable character introduction in film, surpassing John Wayne in Stagecoach or Rita Hayworth in Gilda. We follow a cat from Anna's apartment who finds him standing in a doorway; his face emerges from shadow with a little knowing smirk as Cotten finally recognizes him. Accompanied by the memorable zither theme, it's a moment in film as powerful as the best of them. The black and white photography is jaw-dropping. While classified noir for the dreamlike, nocturnal photography featuring dark shadows and shards of light in vacant streets, there are few other noir tropes here apart from the general murder mystery. Anna is not a femme fatale but an Ingrid Bergman-like character from Casablanca who remains loyal to Lime and doesn't engage romantically with Cotten, despite his advances.

Then there's the Ferris wheel scene with Cotten meeting Welles, whose character turns out to be quite the villain. He cynically dismisses the harm his penicillin dilution on the black market has done, and we get the famous speech written by Welles himself: "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." We learned earlier from the British sergeant that Lime was stealing penicillin from military hospitals, diluting it, and selling it on the black market, which killed and hospitalized many children. There's a haunting shot of the sergeant taking Cotten through a children's ward to show the damage done, and we never see any children, just Cotten's horrified reaction as he looks at the beds. Immediately after one reaction shot, we see a teddy bear doll sprawled face down like a twisted puppet. It suggests the dead child without showing it.

Of course, the final chase in the sewers with Lime running from police and the dance of light and shadow in the subterranean sewage system is a tour-de-force of filmmaking. Realistically we know it should be pitch dark in the sewers, but the photography has characters back-lit, the passageways illuminated by strange sources of light and there's a superb use of sound and echoes of footsteps. It's a thrilling and stylized chase sequence that ends with Lime shot and his dying gestures are reaching through a grating, his fingers feeling the air for freedom but nothing else.

A scene that occurred earlier with Cotten observing Anna walking up a street on the outskirts of the city away from a cemetery is bookended in a very long take and long shot. We see a road to the cemetery flanked by rows of trees receding into the background like a Renaissance painting showcasing perspective. Cotten stands nearby waiting for her to walk up and it takes a full minute as she is a speck in the distance and finally comes into focus. But she ignores him and continues walking through the shot and the film ends.

Carol Reed (not a woman by the way) has achieved what seems to be one of the best films ever made, and often voted the best British film ever made. It is certainly a towering work of black and white photography by Robert Krasker who was keenly influenced by German expressionism. The zither theme composed by Anton Karas gives the movie its unique flavor and may be considered weird by modern audiences. Ebert said "the sound is jaunty but without joy, like whistling in the dark. It sets the tone; the action begins like an undergraduate lark and then reveals vicious undertones."