Watching some noir this long weekend

Harry Lime:

Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, 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. So long Holly.

This weekend I caught the famous noir thriller “The Third Man”. What a great movie! I really enjoyed the plot. It had all the usual, post-war amorality, a stunning European dame, Yankee idealism, European cynicism, and the question of what can we say for ourselves, as a race, when The Judgment comes.

I was on a bit of an Orson Welles kick. His geist seems to be in the air wtith War of the Xenu, er Ritalin, er Worlds running and with his mention in the recently-viewed-by-me “Ed Wood.” Welles is just one of those stunning talents that I don’t think that any actor of today could even hope to rival in scope (and no, I’m not talking about his weight problem).

I got the Criterion collection version so it had some great extra bits provided by Peter Bogdanovich. If you see the film, I think this is definitely the DVD version to make sure you get.