I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better. I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market — we’d run anything, if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course, a situation like that does tend to amateurs — but you know they can’t stay the course like a professional.

This opening voiceover, by director Carol Reed, captures in a few words the mood of Graham Greene’s film treatment for The Third Man. Its superficial cosmopolitanism — “I preferred Constantinople” — is undercut by a rival insistence on the distinctions of the British class system, with its insiders and outsiders, amateurs and professionals, sophisticates and innocents.

Graham Greene was, of course, an insider. He was born in the private school where his father was master. His family was at the centre of English life. His parents were first cousins, and the family was built on brewers, bankers, and statesmen. His grandmother was first cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson. While he rose to prominence as a writer, his younger brother, Hugh, became the director-general of the BBC.

Greene himself had one of the most enviable careers in English literary history. Over 67 years, he was nominated for the Nobel multiple times for books that were at once popular thrillers and morally and intellectually serious. It’s hard to do one of these well, never mind both.

But his script frames this old-school, boys-club point of view, suggesting it is at once a comforting illusion, and pernicious. It’s used here, for example, to distinguish the “good” black marketeers from the bad ones. It elides moral distinctions in favour of ones centred on status and refinement.

The film is set in the rubble of the Second World War, in Vienna, where it was shot on location. It is well worth watching for the crumbling city alone, which is a living, complex, and beautiful presence. Director Carol Reed uses the city as a theatre, to bring to vivid life the story the film pursues.

Occupied after the war by the four allied powers, America, Britain, France, and Russia, who each patrol a quadrant, Vienna is a shifting kaleidoscope of often inaccessible points of view. They figure like foreign languages, and traditions and histories not fully understood — like the German the city’s inhabitants speak amongst themselves, and which the film does not translate.

Elusive, or misunderstood, or simply unknown viewpoints figure within the action as myriad windows overlooking streets, sudden rays of light that illuminate, shadows that obscure. Doorways reveal secret locations, such as the system of pitch black tunnels underneath the city.

Countering this sense of dislocation is the relative familiarity of the point of view of Holly Martins. An outsider, Martins is an American innocent who arrives in Vienna to visit an old school friend, only to stumble into one disaster after another, understanding nothing.

He is a writer, but of the wrong kind — of westerns. That he keeps being taken for an important writer of highbrow novels is a running joke. That the film maintains a comic edge through the multiple failures it pursues is another reason to see it.

A third is the main character, who, it turns out, is not Holly Martins, but his friend, Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles.

Greene was tapped by Reed to write the screenplay, and did so in a few weeks. He was paid 9,000 pounds — the equivalent of $850,000 in today’s dollars. With it he bought himself a villa in Capri, which he enjoyed for the rest of his life, and a yacht.

Welles, on the other hand, was paid 25,000 pounds for his few days on set.

His performance here is both brief and unforgettable. 

The Third Man screens at The Regent on Monday 7 April at 7pm.