The New Pictures, Feb. 6, 1950

The Third Man (Sir Alexander Korda; David O. Selznick) is already a smash hit in Britain, where most critics hailed it as the best movie of 1949. U.S. moviegoers are likely to find it one of the best of 1950. Like The Fallen Idol, by the same brilliant British team—Director Carol Reed and Scripter Graham Greene—it adds an extra depth of character insight and a new texture of pictorial eloquence to the kind of spellbinding thriller that made Alfred Hitchcock famous.

Set and filmed in a forlorn, postwar Vienna, The Third Man is crammed...