One of the most elegantly made suspense films of all-time. A moody and ruinous post-war Vienna is as much a character here as any of the actors. Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins is a broke writer who arrives in the city with the promise of a job from his old friend Harry Lime. A big problem: Lime’s dead. Got hit by a car just a few days ago. Another problem: None of the accounts of Lime’s death match up exactly. On top of that, Martins is a complete foreigner in Austria. For him, Vienna is a hostile creature that speaks a language that he doesn’t understand and that usually lies to him when he does understand. It’s all shadows and sewers and police—Martins has a kneejerk dislike for police—with a beautiful and complex woman (Alida Valli) in there to 
make life a little more bearable while Martins tries to figure out what the hell is going on. Along the way, Orson Welles gets one of the greatest onscreen introductions in film history and Anton Karas’s playfully menacing all-zither score pulls you deeper into the atmosphere.
This was written especially for the movies by the great novelist Graham Greene (he first wrote this as a novella, which he never intended to publish, as a part of his process), and his voice is all over this. However, the famous “cuckoo clock” line delivered by Orson Welles at the end of a memorable speech here came from Welles himself.