Joseph Cotten’s Holly Martins, a down-on-his-luck writer of western pulp, rolls like a tumbleweed into town only to find that the friend who invited him is dead. The town happens to be a post-WWII, Allied-occupied Vienna, and the friend a shadowy figure with a flagrant disregard for the collateral damage he has wreaked. Sticking around to solve the mystery of his friend, Martins is pulled into intrigue which only grows more dangerous as he is also drawn to his friend’s bereaved sweetheart, played with world-weary allure by Alida Valli. Although the iconic film is now celebrated as the quintessential Graham Greene film, the author conceived The Third Man as a novella written as a treatment, i.e. a screenplay draft. Greene later explained that it was, “never written to be read, only seen” and was for him a challenge to write a screenplay directly.