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Joseph Cotten plays American pulp novelist Holly Martins, "just a hack writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls." He comes to post-World War II Vienna to take a job with an old buddy, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), but is told Lime has just died under mysterious circumstances. Then there's the matter of Lime's girlfriend, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), who's got forged papers and too many memories. What the melancholy performances and the haunting zither music can't evoke of sleazy, black-market Vienna in the '40s, Robert Krasker's Oscar-winning cinematography can. Don't miss the climactic chase scene through the sewers.