Posted by Haggai
on 9/14/2009, 7:04 am, in reply to "NOTW: The Third Man (1949) 9/14/2009"
192.189.236.20
Good write-up, Rand. Among all the great aspects of this film, I think it must be the withering cynicism that appeals most to us noir fans.
While I don't want to turn the whole thread into an argument about the music, I do want to point out that--as detailed in Charles Drazin's book "In Search of The Third Man," which I recommend to fans of the movie--the Karas score was one of the main reasons the film reached such huge audiences at the time of its release. In many places, the music was extremely popular even before the film was released. One of the anecdotes in the book is that when the movie first opened in Scotland, some months after its original release in England but after the theme music was already popular throughout the UK, audiences lined up for hours in freezing winter temperatures to see it--and when the film started rolling, they were all humming out loud with the theme music in the opening credits.
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