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For Carol Reed's next film, The Fallen Idol, he would call upon the services of Georges Perinal as director of photography. Perinal did all the interiors for the picture but Robert Krasker's old compatriot Wilkie Cooper photographed the exteriors, including the famous night scenes on the London streets, which would so electrify Reed. Cooper's haunting images stayed in Reed's mind for a long time afterwards, all during, in fact, his writing with Graham Greene the script for their next film, The Third Man. Reed would have need of images like that again, this time on the streets of war-devastated Vienna.

Robert Krasker's greatest photographic triumph is undoubtedly The Third Man, a work which earned him the Academy Award in 1949. A superb film, thought by many to be Reed's finest, it needs no introduction. Krasker was a key factor in its initial impact on contemporary audiences and upon its lasting impact since. The photography has a spidery, deliciously expressionistic quality to it, which Krasker brings not only to the realistic daylight scenes in the Vienna environs but to the famous night scenes in the streets and sewers as well. As was customary other cinematographers needed to be brought in to help. The many second-unit night scenes in the streets and sewers of Vienna were shot, very much with Fallen Idol in mind, by John Wilcox and Ted Scaife (ironically, Wilkie Cooper turned down the invitation to do these second unit shots). Yet The Third Man remains Robert Krasker's masterpiece.

His output is so varied and interesting and so visually distinctive that if space permitted one could with profit study many of the films he worked on and learn thereby the art and artifice of motion picture photography from him and no one else, and this is said with all due respect to his many talented fellow-cameramen working during that intensely creative time. Later in his career he became almost "typed" as the cameraman for great screen epics. From Robert Rossen's Alexander the Great, Krasker's first "epic" assignment, to Samuel Bronston's hugely enjoyable El Cid some years later, both magnificently photographed, the cameraman would show that that delicacy he learned years before under the great Perinal was not submerged by the need to create mere spectacle. That gifted eye of his, however, brought a look to Bronston's next epic that has, in this writer's opinion, never been surpassed. The film was the 1964 Fall of the Roman Empire.

An unusually intelligent super-production, Roman Empire received from its cameraman his very best work ever. Because the film was not the commercial success hoped for it has become somewhat buried, a fact, sadly, that prevents those who admire Bob Krasker from seeing what can be achieved by a skilled, sensitive cameraman with a big enough budget to allow him all the tools he needed. If ever an original TechniColour print of it surfaces in a classics theatre, drop everything and see it. Then, if you have a strong enough stomach, compare this work of beauty against the hysterical, over-the-top and unofficial remake, Gladiator. That simple comparison will eloquently argue the point of the earlier film's vast superiority.

With the alarming decline in motion picture standards and craftsmanship ushered in the late 1960s, and still plaguing us, Robert Krasker, like several of his contemporaries, decided to retire. As there were no films of any distinction being offered him any longer he did not wish to end his career on a sour note. True, his health was failing a little at the same time. But the rubbish-flingers were slowly and inexorably winning the day and Krasker decided that he had done enough. After The Trap in 1966 his only other film was a low-budget 1980 thriller, shot to help a young filmmaker get off the ground (neither the film nor the filmmaker were ever heard from again).

When grace, skill and great style are once again commodities appreciated by audiences and critics then the fine work of Robert Krasker and his fellow-British cameramen will resume their natural prominent place.