Synopsis

“Shadowing The Third Man” explores the making of Graham Greene’s all time classic noir film “The Third Man”. This is the first documentary ever to be made on this much-loved film, which was voted the best British film of the 20th century in a BFI poll.

For the next 90 minutes the Anglo-Austrian director Frederick Baker takes the audience on a journey, following Greene’s story, while dividing fact from fiction about its making.
“Shadowing the Third Man” literally projects the classic 1948 feature film back to the original locations in the Austrian capital Vienna. Using state-of-the–art projection technology, the stunning images created by Carol Reed and the Oscar-winning DOP, Robert Krasker are beamed on a huge scale onto the glorious architecture of restored Vienna. So the city reclaims its place as one of the film's central characters.
The viewers see how Carol Reed used the ruins of a bombed out city, just 3 years after WWII to set a superb stage for such stars as Orson Welles (The unforgettable Harry Lime), Joseph Cotton, (the naive American novelist, Holly Martins), Trevor Howard (The suave controlled English officer Major Calloway) and Alida Valli (The coldly beautiful refugee Anna).
Two of the last remaining members of the crew return to tour the locations and bring the filming to life. The Assistant Director Guy Hamilton, who went on to direct three Bond movies is joined by the continuity assistant Angela Allen, to tell what it was like to film in the Vienna sewers, and how a drunk Trevor Howard was arrested for impersonating a British officer, while still in his costume as the sober Major Calloway.
The films producer's Frederick Baker and Avril MacRory have worked closely with the co-producers Ron Halpern (Studiocanal), Franz Grabner (ORF)and Anthony Wall (BBC) to develop the film and access the exclusive set stills, Austrian newsreels and BBC recordings, together with Nobuo Isobe (NHK), Charles Tabesh (TCM) and Peter Zawrel (WFF-Vienna).