This title in particular has been the subject of a good deal of controversy on Elsewhere (among other sites), message boards, and email lists across the web. No one seems to talk about much aside from the "Grain Issue." Since the grain (or overabundance thereof) is the obvious elephant in the room, I'm going to address it before getting on to the additional content on display here, of which there is much to see and thoroughly enjoy.
There are those who defend the amount of grain as "director's intent" or historical accuracy, and there are those who wonder why this didn't get cleaned up a bit as WB did on Casablanca (the publisher of this site included). Another layer on this argument is the mess that has resulted from digital post-Post adjustment with a number of vintage films, from the de-graining of Sunset Boulevard (DVD) and Patton (Blu) to the complete color re-correction on The French Connection (Blu). I hope that not only do the guys at Fantastic Fest continue this past year's Fantastic Debates, but I hope that they choose a topic about digital "correction" because it would inevitably end in a gang battle with enough critics in attendance. Think Anchorman with less mustaches and suits and more t-shirts and beards or goatees...and beer.
Anyone reading should take a look at the images comparing the Criterion releases in DVD Beaver's exceptional (as always) breakdown of the differences between the Criterion versions (original DVD, DVD reissue, and Blu-ray). In particular, I have to point out what I consider the emptiest argument around on this disc: why do the DVD transfers look "better," easiest seen when you look at closeups and medium shots of different people? The simple answer is the contrast and bitrate were "fixed," still faithful to the original source, but you could classify the Blu-ray transfer as inferior entirely relative to the setup upon which you're viewing the disc in question.
For hi-def pros, please indulge me in reading (or skipping) through the next bit. I'm newer to HD monitors than many of you are, but just as many may be relative neophytes as well.
The Evolution of Digital Mastering and Criterion's Third Man
One of the filthy open secrets of DVD is that, faced with evolving and higher-quality technology that it'd be viewed on, much of the high-end mastering for DVD has been for naught thanks to inferior viewing equipment being used by most everyone watching it. This is why substandard transfers, Pan and Scan, and non-anamorphic widescreen have refused to die. Your dad/uncle/in-law who doesn't know any better thinks "it looks great! Better than VHS! I hate black bars!"
Instead of the monitor manufacturers moving us forward (Great Britain switched to digital broadcast BEFORE 2000), they kowtowed to your 70 year old grandfather. They've long been complacent to let movies shown on TV have the sides chopped off. These people are the same reason TCM isn't broadcast in HD yet.
The interesting difference in the rise of Blu-ray is that they're over-doing resolution (if that's possible) anticipating the day when 1080p is considered pedestrian and an eyesore, running counter the conventional wisdom previously employed across the video industry. The lowest common denominator is not their concern, and hats off to them for it.
There's a world of difference when you use 42+" display, which is where you actually see the difference between 1080, 720, or SD up-converted.
I took Criterion's Third Man Blu-ray for a spin and was shocked at how the grain looked like it was positively boiling on the faces of everyone in the movie. Surely the much-ballyhooed Criterion Collection gurus couldn't have meant for it to look like this. I put in the original release DVD of the same film and it looked a hundred times better. How the hell was this possible? It turns out that calibration was the culprit.
On HD sets, each HDMI port usually carries its own display settings. When I first hooked up my Sony BDP-350 Blu-ray player, I thought I took care of this, making the same adjustments I had on my other inputs (drop the Backlight, up the Contrast, tweak the Brightness, turn off 120Hz, etc.). The thing I didn't touch was Sharpness, and once I yanked that down near if not 0, my god what a difference. If there were one remaining blessing Criterion could give us, it'd be a unique little featurette for their Blu-ray releases that recommends calibration settings, because they obviously get high-def fine-tuning much better than the average person out there. I'm sure all that artificial "sharpening" makes CGI animal movies look great, but now I'm wise to how much my enemy it is.
Having now re-watched the disc with settings re-tweaked, it's glorious. I wouldn't change anything when it comes to this transfer. If you "cleaned" it any more, you'd get into the horror show territory that is the Patton Blu-ray disc. The transfer on this disc is a perfect reference for vintage material in HD.
The Movie
The Third Man was originally released in 1950, and is set in post-WWII, quadruple-occupied Vienna. American dime novelist Holly Martins travels there to meet his dear friend Harry Lime. Lime the character was the focus of radio shows and dime novels himself, and here the character of Martins arrives just as Lime has apparently died. Orson Welles is openly credited as playing Harry Lime, so for those who haven't seen the movie, connect the dots yourself.
The genius of the script and the progression of the movie, and why it endures isn't that the whodunnit nature of things keeps you guessing as much as how things happen and the craft that goes into it putting so much of what is made these days (six decades on) to shame. Rarely are casting, lensing, and cutting so perfect.
Supplementals
You've got two audio commentaries, one by Steven Soderbergh and Tony Gilroy that is engaging and enjoyable. They jump in with a great deal of energy that continues throughout the rest of the track. There's a second track by film scholar Dana Polan, a professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts who's written some books on film. I only got a few minutes into Polan's track and it reminded me of Humanities Film Studies classes i took in college. There's a lot of chatter about Gaze Theory and what each individual does moment by moment by moment on top of a mind-numbing amount of film history trivia. The Soderbergh/Gilroy track you can listen to anytime, the Polan is the more analytical and institutional. Polan's may be the favorite of the student, whereas the Soderbergh/Gilroy of the fan.
The aforementioned features join Shadowing the Third Man (2005, which you may have seen on Turner Classic Movies), "Graham Greene: The Hunted Man", Who Was the Third Man? (2000), a featurette that looks at the untranslated or unsubtitled bits of the film, and a nice liner notes booklet as holdovers from the re-issue version from a few years ago. There's nothing new in terms of quantity of content, just picture and audio bitrate improvement. All are top notch, and varied enough that even if you aren't a completist when it comes to watching Criterion releases, there's something for everyone.
Included as they were in both the re-issue and the original Criterion disc are a video introduction from Peter Bogdanovich that does what it needs to and doesn't wear out its welcome, The Third Man on the Radio (the Lux Theatre radio production and a Lives of Harry Lime episode), Richard Clarke reading Graham Greene's treatment (abridged, which one might alternately consider a third comment track, but serves as more an interesting table reading simultaneous to seeing a completed production), Joseph Cotten's alternate opening V.O., and both trailers.
Shadowing the Third Man on its own makes this one worth a purchase compared to similarly-priced Blu-rays out there, but if you really love this film (as I do) or want to learn more about early 1950's or noir cinema, it's a must-own. The Criterion price premium effect that has pushed their discs outside the budgets of most folks has thankfully dissipated, with a Blu-ray copy of The Third Man running you in the mid-$20 range. In fact, the Blu-ray Criterion pricing is fairly in-line with their standard releases, and depending on where you get it, occasionally a couple bucks less. This was the first Blu-ray disc I spun on my own home setup, and you could do far worse yourself if you're new to the format as well.