Who played Holly Martins in the 1949 film 'The Third Man'?

Joseph Cotten played Holly Martins in the 1949 film noir The Third Man.

Directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, the film follows Martins, an American writer of Western pulp novels who arrives in postwar Vienna after being invited by his old friend Harry Lime. Martins discovers that Lime has supposedly died, then begins investigating conflicting accounts of the accident. His search exposes a much darker story involving black-market penicillin and corruption in the Allied-occupied city.

Cotten’s character is often confused with Orson Welles’s Harry Lime, one of cinema’s most famous villains. Welles is central to the film’s publicity and appears in the celebrated sewer sequence, but he plays Lime, not Martins. Trevor Howard plays Major Calloway, while James Mason is not part of the principal cast.

The film is also known for Robert Krasker’s stark black-and-white cinematography, Anton Karas’s zither score, and its postwar Viennese setting. The British Film Institute named it the greatest British film in a 1999 poll.