S.W.’s Scores
Continuity
+6
Entertainment
+5
Rewatchability
+4
CastOrson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard
StreamingCriterion Channel, Prime Video (rent)
S.W.’s Verdict
A pulp writer arrives in postwar Vienna looking for his friend and finds a corpse and a conspiracy. The zither score is disorienting in exactly the right way. The canted angles make the whole city feel drunk. Orson Welles shows up late, delivers the cuckoo clock speech, and steals the entire film with maybe fifteen minutes of screen time. The sewer chase is still one of the best sequences in cinema. Carol Reed understood that a thriller works best when the world around it feels broken.