“I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm...” Spoken by director Carol Reed, in the voice of an unseen black marketeer, those words open his 1949 classic The Third Man, which I’ve always enjoyed watching again and again after seeing the movie sometime in the mid-’90s at a tiny cinema in Vienna near the Volksprater, the park that’s the site of the famous ferris wheel scene. Still, I never got around to ponying up the $60 that Criterion was asking for its fine DVD edition of the film, and good thing, too, because they’ve just come out with a luxe new double-disc special edition going for something like half the price.

What a set it is, too, a real treat for Third Man lovers. The first disc features a new transfer of the film, an intro from Peter Bogdanovich and commentaries by Steven Soderbergh and Dana Polan. On the second, you get Shadowing the Third Man, a 2005, feature-length doc on the making of the film, a 1968 episode of the British TV series Omnibus, featuring an hour-long profile of writer Graham Greene, a couple of Third Man radio episodes, a 30-minute doc commissioned by, of all things, the Vienna sewer authority, and archival bits like Joseph Cotten’s alternate take on the above-quoted opening narration.

by MARK SLUTSKY