The Third Man Is A Constantly Riveting Feature That Brilliant Subverts Norms of the Noir Genre

SPOILERS AHEAD! 

One of the many wonderful things about watching The Third Man for the first time was discovering it belong to one of my favorite subgenres of world cinema, post-World War II movies. I am utterly fascinated by non-American features that explore life directly in the wake of World War II, it's a perspective that was never covered in my public education experience and getting to explore the various perspectives of foreign countries in the wake of this worldwide conflict through the lens of cinema has been eye-opening. Bicycle Thieves, Tokyo Story, Drunken Angel, so many good stories have been told about people trying to move on with their lives in the wake of all the events of World War II and The Third Man is one of the most thrilling entries in this subgenre.

The Lady From Shanghai Is Utterly Ludicrous, Which Is A Compliment

There are some things mankind is destined to never truly understand. Among such impossible to fully grasp matters is the Irish accent Orson Welles chose to adorn for the lead role of his 1948 directorial effort The Lady From Shanghai. One of a number of forays into film noir that Welles would pursue both as a performer and as a director, Welles gives his performance as this film's central protagonist a pervasive thick Irish accent that, thanks to opening voice-over narration (this is a classic film noir after all) begins the film on a note of ludicrousness. There's plenty more where that came from, of course, and the wicked peculiar streak of The Lady from Shanghai is what makes it a lot of fun to watch.

Orson Welles And All His Complexities Make For A great Documentary In They'll Love Me When I'm Dead

The saga of filming The Other Side of the Wind for years on end is a fascinating story in and of itself, there's more than enough material in that saga to fill up a whole documentary or two. But though They'll Love Me When I'm Dead primarily concerns itself with the multi-year process of filming this motion picture, it uses that tale as a springboard for a larger exploration of the career of Orson Welles, which kicked off with a bang with Citizen Kane but spiraled into endless creative difficulties as he struggled to work with studio executives who hindered or outright ignored his work. Welles is a mythic figure of cinema in the modern age just as he was for many young directors at the start of the 1970s, but his career was rife with difficulty that gets explored throughout They'll Love Me When I'm Dead.

The Magnificent Ambersons Are The Centerpiece of A Well-Done Orson Welles Directorial Effort

For any director, doing a follow-up directorial project to a particularly acclaimed piece of work is a daunting prospect, one that some filmmakers have exceled in (like Marielle Heller) while other filmmakers (like Dan Gilroy) found more mixed results in the same scenario. For Orson Welles, this was a particularly tricky scenario for him back in the early 1940's as he was preparing his directorial follow-up to a little-known movie called Citizen Kane. Though plagued by controversy in its initial release, Citizen Kane was still garnering acclaim and had set the bar high for whatever he did next, which turned out to be a motion picture adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons.

It's Taken Forty-Plus Years To Get Released, But The Wait For The Other Side of the Wind Was Worth It!

This is my 1,000th movie review for Land of the Nerds! Over the course of about four-and-a-half years, I've watched and written about a ton of movies and I'm grateful to each and every one of you readers for supporting my cinematic pursuits, which include a most unique motion picture to serve as the subject of my 1,000th review!

You take the good with the bad. Yes, Netflix may finance annual Adam Sandler comedies, one of which features the sight of David Spade physically beating Paula Patton while shouting about what a good guy he is, but at least they've done good for the world of art by using their seemingly endless oceans of money to complete Orson Welles final film The Other Side of the Wind. This project started filming in the early 1970's and after a six-year-long filming process began an extensive post-production session that Orson Welles didn't finish before his passing in October 1985. In the more than three decades since then, the footage for this film has been mired in endless legal controversy that prevented it from being finished up.