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The Third Man is a British film noir directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard and Orson Welles. The screenplay was written by novelist Graham Greene. Greene's novella of the same name, written in preparation for writing the screenplay, was published in 1950.
ustria's capital city, Vienna, just after the Second World War, when the city is divided into separate zones controlled by the victorious Allied powers – Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union – American pulp western author Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives seeking an old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has offered him the opportunity to work with him in Vienna.
When he arrives at Lime's apartment, Martins learns that Lime has been recently killed by a lorry while crossing the street.
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Quotations
HUNTED...By a thousand men! Haunted...By a lovely girl!
Poor Harry. I wish he was dead. He would be safe from all of you then.
That's a nice girl, that. But she ought to go careful in Vienna. Everybody ought to go careful in a city like this.
after seeing victims of Harry's scheme All right, Calloway, you win...I'll be your dumb decoy duck.
to Anna I've just seen a dead man walking. I saw him buried, but now I've seen him alive.
to Holly I am not a bad man. I'd like to tell you something...Come tonight. My wife goes out...Tonight.
Encyclopedia
The Third Man is a British film noir directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard and Orson Welles. The screenplay was written by novelist Graham Greene. Greene's novella of the same name, written in preparation for writing the screenplay, was published in 1950.
Plot
In Austria's capital city, Vienna, just after the Second World War, when the city is divided into separate zones controlled by the victorious Allied powers – Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union – American pulp western author Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives seeking an old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has offered him the opportunity to work with him in Vienna.
When he arrives at Lime's apartment, Martins learns that Lime has been recently killed by a lorry while crossing the street. Shocked, he heads to the cemetery to attend Lime's funeral, where he meets two British military police officers, Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee), who is an enormous fan of Martins' books, and his superior, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard). After the services, Calloway gives Martins a lift to his hotel and advises the American to leave Vienna as he can do nothing more than get himself into trouble.
At the hotel, Martins agrees to speak to the members of the local book club at the request of a British cultural official, Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White). He also arranges a meeting with a friend of Lime's, Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch). Martins meets the man in the Mozart Café to discuss Lime's death. Kurtz relates that he and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer), another friend of Lime's, had picked him up and brought him over to the side of the street, where he had asked them to take care of Martins and Anna (Alida Valli), Lime's actress girlfriend. Kurtz tells Martins which theatre Anna works in, but advises against investigating.
Martins heads to Anna's theatre workplace and arranges a meeting with her. During their conversation, he becomes suspicious and wonders if Lime's death had really been an accident. Later, the porter at Lime's apartment house (Paul Hoerbiger) tells Martins that there is no way that Lime could have been alive after being hit by the lorry, due to the way his neck was bent. He adds that he saw three men carry the body across the street, not two, as Kurtz and Popescu had claimed. Martins pressures the porter to tell his story to the police, but the man refuses, becoming agitated, and asks Martins to leave.
Martins walks Anna back to her apartment, where the police are searching her room. When they find a forged passport they leave, taking Anna with them. Martins speaks with the other witnesses, but learns nothing new.
The next day, the porter asks Martins to meet him that night so he can give him more information. Martins convinces Anna to accompany him and translate. They arrive at the porter's apartment, only to find that he has been murdered. The crowd around the building suspects Martins and chases after him. He eludes capture and arrives at the book club meeting. There, he tries to field intellectual questions such as whether he uses the stream of consciousness writing technique and who has influenced his work. He stammers out a few brief answers, satisfying no one (nobody had known that he only wrote Western novels). Virtually everyone in the audience walks out on his presentation. After saying that his upcoming novel is called The Third Man and is inspired by actual facts, he flees when he notices two suspicious-looking men at the back of the hall. He eventually meets up with the British policeman Calloway.
Calloway advises Martins to leave Vienna and, when Martins refuses, reveals the truth about Lime's racket. Calloway says that Lime stole penicillin from military hospitals and then sold it in diluted form, and in the process killed or injured many people. After seeing the evidence, Martins is convinced of Lime's crimes and agrees to leave Vienna. As he departs the police station, a Russian officer comes in and asks Calloway for Anna's passport so that he may arrest her despite Calloway's reluctance.
Martins heads back to Anna's apartment to say goodbye and discovers that she has also learned what Lime has done. Leaving her apartment, Martins hears Anna's cat meow, looks across the darkened square, and barely discerns a man in the doorway, the cat rubbing against his legs. A moment later, a woman across the street opens her window to yell at Martins, spilling light onto the man in the doorway. It is Harry Lime, alive and well. Lime runs off around the corner and disappears, prompting Martins to summon Calloway, who determines that Lime has escaped into the sewers via a kiosk. Calloway realizes that Lime has used the sewer tunnels to move about the city undetected. The police then exhume Lime's coffin and find that another man, Joseph Harbin, has been buried in his place. Harbin, an orderly in a military hospital, was thought to have stolen the penicillin.
The next day, Martins meets with Lime in the Soviet sector, on Vienna's celebrated Ferris wheel, the Riesenrad, in the Wurstelprater amusement park. They talk and Lime offers to bring Martins in on his racket, but Martins rejects the offer. In an effort to bring Martins over to his side, Lime compares the people moving on the ground far below to dots, and asks if he really cares about them.
Calloway asks Martins to help capture Lime by luring him to a cafe in the International Zone where the police can apprehend him. Martins negotiates safe conduct for Anna out of Vienna, but she discovers the plot and refuses to leave. Martins reconsiders his involvement and tries to call it off, but Calloway takes him to a hospital and shows him children crippled by meningitis after receiving Lime's under-strength penicillin. Martins again agrees to assist in the trap. When Lime arrives at the cafe, he evades capture but the police chase him into the sewers where he is eventually cornered and he opens fire on Paine, killing him. Lime is then shot by Major Calloway, but manages to drag himself up a staircase to a grating. Martins then takes Sergeant Paine's gun and, after a moment of hesitation, kills his old friend. Martins attends Lime's second funeral. Afterwards, he waits in the road to speak with Anna, but she simply walks past him.
Adaptation of the source material
Before writing the screenplay, Greene worked out the atmosphere, characterization, and mood of the story by writing a novella. This was written purely to be used as a source text for the screenplay and was never intended to be read by the general public, although it was later published (alongside The Fallen Idol).
The narrator in the novella is Major Calloway, a British military policeman, which gives the book a slightly different emphasis from that of the screenplay. A small portion of his narration is retained in a modified form at the very beginning of the film, the part in which (Reed's) voice-over declaims: "I never knew the old Vienna..."
Other differences include the nationality of both Holly and Harry; they are English in the book. Martins' first name is Rollo rather than Holly. Popescu's character is an American called Cooler. Crabbin was a single character in the novella. In the original draft of the screenplay, he was to be replaced by two characters, played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, but ultimately in the film (like the novella), Crabbin is a single character.
Perhaps the fundamental difference is the end of the novella, in which it is implied that Anna and Rollo (Holly) are about to begin a new life together, in stark contrast to the unmistakable snub by Anna that marks the end of the movie. Anna does walk away from Harry's grave in the book, but the text continues: I watched him striding off on his overgrown legs after the girl. He caught her up and they walked side by side. I don't think he said a word to her: it was like the end of a story except that before they turned out of my sight her hand was through his arm - which how a story usually begins. He was a very bad shot and a very bad judge of character, but he had a way with Westerns (a trick of tension) and with girls (I wouldn't know what).
During the shooting of the film, the final scene was the subject of a dispute between Greene, who wanted the happy ending of the novella, and Selznick and Reed, who stubbornly refused to end the film on what they felt was an artificially happy note. This is one of the few areas where Reed and Selznick did not clash during the production.
Cast
* Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins
Production
The film was shot on location in Vienna with additional scenes shot in England. The tall and wide sewer shown in the film is in fact the tunnel of the Wienfluß (Vienna River), although many shots were also filmed in a London studio. After one day's shooting, Welles declined to film in the sewers and sets were built at Shepperton Studios to finish the film. There is a great deal of footage using doubles for Welles that were shot in the actual sewers. Water was sprayed on the cobbled streets to make them reflect the light at night.
Differences between releases
As the original British release begins, an unnamed narrator, the voice of director Carol Reed, is heard describing post-war Vienna from the point of view of a racketeer. The version shown in American theatres replaced this with narration by Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins. This change was made by David O. Selznick, who did not think American audiences would relate to the seedy tone of the original. In addition, eleven minutes were cut. Today, Reed's original version now appears on American DVDs and in showings on Turner Classic Movies. Both the Criterion Collection and Studio Canal releases include a comparison of the two opening monologues.
Style
The atmospheric use of black and white expressionist cinematography (by Robert Krasker), with harsh lighting and distorted camera angles, is a key feature of The Third Man. Combined with the unique theme music, seedy locations, and acclaimed performances from the cast, the style evokes the atmosphere of an exhausted, cynical post-war Vienna at the start of the Cold War. The film's unusual camera angles, however, were not appreciated by all critics. C. A. Lejeune in The Observer described Reed's "habit of printing his scenes askew, with floors sloping at a diagonal and close-ups deliriously tilted" as "most distracting". American director William Wyler, a close friend of Reed's, sent him a spirit level, with a note saying, "Carol, next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera, will you?"
Score
The distinctive musical score was composed by Anton Karas and played by him on the zither. Before the production came to Vienna, Karas was an unknown wine bar performer. Reed and Howard fell in love with Karas' zither music after hearing him play in a Viennese café. Karas agreed to record some of his compositions on a reel-to-reel tape machine that Reed set up in the bedroom of his hotel. "The Third Man Theme", was released as a single in 1950 (Decca in UK, London Records in USA). It became a best-seller and later an LP was released. The exposure made Karas an international star. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "Has there ever been a film where the music more perfectly suited the action than in Carol Reed's 'The Third Man'?"
The comedian Victor Borge later covered the theme on piano for his album Caught in the Act, and a version with a faster tempo and without the zither was featured on the album "Going Places" by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. The music is also used in a bar scene in the 2002 film xXx.
The cuckoo clock speech
In a famous scene, looking down upon the people beneath from his vantage point on top of the Riesenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park, Lime compares them to dots. Back on the ground, he makes the now famous remark:
"You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
This remark was not in the script by Graham Greene but was added by Welles (in the published script, it is in a footnote); Greene wrote in a letter (Oct. 13, 1977) "What happened was that during the shooting of The Third Man it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence." Welles apparently said the lines came from "an old Hungarian play"; the painter Whistler, in a lecture on art from 1885 (published in Mr Whistler's 'Ten O'Clock [1888]), had said, "The Swiss in their mountains ... What more worthy people! ... yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!" In This is Orson Welles (1993), Welles is quoted as saying "When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they've never made any cuckoo clocks."
Awards and honors
The Third Man won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, the British Academy Award for Best Film, and an Academy Award for Best Black and White Cinematography in .
In , the British Film Institute selected The Third Man as the best British film of the 20th century; five years later, the magazine Total Film ranked it fourth. The film also placed 57th on the American Film Institute's list of top American films, "100 Years... 100 Movies" in 1998, though the film's only American connection was its executive co-producer, David O. Selznick; the other two, Sir Alexander Korda and Carol Reed, were British. In June 2008, the AFI revealed its "Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. The Third Man was acknowledged as the fifth best film in the mystery genre. In 2005, viewers of BBC Television's Newsnight Review voted the film their fourth favourite of all time; it was the only film in the top five made prior to 1970.
American Film Institute recognition
Copyright status
This film lapsed into public domain in the United States when the copyright was not renewed after the death of producer David Selznick. In 1996, the film’s U.S. copyright protection was restored by the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, and the Criterion Collection released a digitally restored DVD of the original British print of the film. In 2008 Criterion released a Bluray edition.
Adaptations
A radio drama series called The Lives of Harry Lime (original British title: The Adventures of Harry Lime), centering on adventures of Harry Lime (voiced by Welles) prior to his "death in Vienna", comprising 52 episodes, was aired in 1951 and 1952. Welles wrote several of the episodes, including "Ticket to Tangiers," which is included on the Criterion Collection and Studio Canal releases of the film. In addition, recordings of the 1952 episodes "Man of Mystery", "Murder on the Riviera" and "Blackmail is a Nasty Word" are included on the Criterion Collection DVD The Complete Mr. Arkadin.
A television series later used the film's title, theme music and the character name "Harry Lime", in which Lime was played by Michael Rennie. However, the Lime character was a wealthy art dealer who behaved like Robin Hood, and had an associate, Bradford Webster (played by Jonathan Harris). The series was produced by the BBC and ran for 77 episodes between 1959 and 1965. It was syndicated in the United States.
In popular culture
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, Harry Lime is revealed to be Bob Cherry, a British spy who (after his career as Lime) becomes the James Bond character "M".
Incompetence is a humorous re-imagining of The Third Man set in a future United Europe in which no individual can be fired for incompetence.
- In Law & Order episode “Fluency,” (original air date 19 January 2005; Season 15, Episode 14), Jack McCoy cross-examines a defendant by describing in detail the Ferris wheel scene in this film. The suspect, charged with second degree manslaughter for selling counterfeit packages of influenza vaccines resulting in the deaths of 16 people, breaks down while recounting the scene himself.
Bibliography
- The Great British Films, pp 134-136, Jerry Vermilye, 1978, Citadel Press, ISBN 080650661X*
External links
at Rotten Tomatoes A Privately Run Museum Dedicated to the Movie Classic 'The Third Man'
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