The Third Man is a British film-noir directed by Carol Reed. It is a paranoid story of social, economic, and moral corruption in a depressed, rotting and crumbling, 20th century Vienna following World War II. In the story, pulp novelist Holly Martins travels to shadowy, postwar Vienna, only to find himself investigating the mysterious death of an old friend, black-market opportunist Harry Lime.
The word ‘noir’ is literally French for ‘black’, giving us the concept of ‘dark film’. French film critics coined the term soon after the end of WWII. In the early part of the 1940s France was occupied by Nazis, making it enemy territory forbidden to receive Hollywood product. By war’s end there was a half-decade backlog of American movies which hit French viewers suddenly in one rush, rather than gradually over the years as usual. From a Hollywood point of view, they’d been an audience asleep for half a decade.
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http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-astory.html
