"You Know, You Ought to Get Yourself a Girl"

The Italian actress Alida Valli died yesterday. Up till now I knew her only as "Valli," her screen name in my all-time favorite movie, The Third Man, in which she costarred with Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. If I'd gone to the trouble to research her life before now, I would have discovered that she had a long and extremely busy film career in Italy after The Third Man and a few other English-language films, including The Paradine Case with Gregory Peck, a Hitchcock film I haven't seen.


I saw The Third Man for the first time when I was a college freshman. The great 1949 film noir, with a screenplay by Graham Greene based on his novel, opened my eyes to the ways in which black and white, light and shadow, could comprise a full palette of their own in a movie. At 18, I had never been fully aware of that -- because I had never seen that palette used so beautifully before then. It was an exciting experience that changed the way I watched movies.

And that unforgettable closing shot in which Valli walks down that long, long tree-lined Viennese promenade, and then (ouch!) just keeps on walking past Joseph Cotten -- one of the great movie moments.