Dutch postcard by Fotoarchief Film en Toneel, no. 3505. Photo: London Films. Orson Welles in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
Vintage photo. Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
Dutch postcard. Photo: Nederland Film. Trevor Howard in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
An unusual and perfect long-shot
Before writing the screenplay for The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), Graham Greene worked out the atmosphere, characterisation, and mood of the story by writing a novella as a treatment for the film script. He did not intend it to be read by the general public, although the novella was later published under the same name as the film. He set the film in post-war, bombed-out Vienna. In 1948, he met Elizabeth Montagu in Vienna. She gave him tours of the city, its sewers, and some of its less reputable nightclubs. She also introduced Greene to Peter Smolka, the central European correspondent for The Times of London. Smolka gave Greene stories about the black market in Vienna. In The Third Man an American, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in shadowy Vienna divided into French, American, British and Russian zones, each with its cadre of suspicious officials. A shortage of supplies has led to a flourishing black market. Martins is an out-of-work pulp fiction novelist, Holly Martins, who was invited by an ex-school friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has offered him a job. He soon discovers that Lime has recently died in a peculiar traffic accident.
At Lime's funeral, Martins meets two British Royal Military Police: Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee), a fan of Martins' books, and Major Calloway (Trevor Howard). Calloway bluntly says Lime was an evil man, and advises Holly to take the next train home. Afterwards, Martins is asked by Mr Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White) to lecture at a book club a few days later. He then meets a friend of Lime's, ‘Baron" Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), who tells Martins that he and another friend, Popescu (Siegfried Breuer), carried Lime to the side of the street after the accident, and that, before he died, Lime asked them to take care of Martins and Lime's girlfriend, actress Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). As Martins and Anna investigate Lime's death, they realise that accounts differ as to whether Lime was able to speak before his death, and whether two men carried away the body, or three. The porter at Lime's apartment (Paul Hörbiger) tells them that he saw a third man helping carry away the body. Later, the porter offers to give Martins more information, but he is murdered before Martins can talk to him again. Martins decides to stay in Vienna and investigate what happened to Harry Lime and who was the third man.
Graham Greene, who not only wrote about spies but occasionally acted as one, based the character of Harry Lime on British double agent Kim Philby. He was Greene's superior in the British Secret Intelligence Service. It was producer Alexander Korda who paired Graham Greene with director Carol Reed. The year before the two had made the thriller The Fallen Idol (1948), which scored a notable success. Korda was very keen to replicate the pairing. The Third Man was meant to be the first of a series of collaborations between Korda and another mega-producer, David O. Selznick. The collaboration did not go smoothly. Reed and Selznick fought over every detail of the film. Selznick wanted to shoot on sets and cast Noel Coward as Harry Lime. He was resistant to Reed's idea of casting Orson Welles in the role since Selznick had labelled Welles as ‘box office poison’.
Selznick was initially also cautious about Anton Karas' music and wanted an upbeat score. During the meetings between Greene and Reed with Selznick, Greene was less than impressed with Selznick. Greene later mocked Selznick's dependency, at that stage, on the drug Benzedrine, better known as ‘speed’. Reed defied convention by shooting entirely on location in Vienna, where mountains of rubble stood next to gaping bomb craters, and the ruins of the empire supported a desperate black market economy. And he insisted on Orson Welles. Reed had worked for the British Army's wartime documentary unit and preferred real locations and real local people as extras, attempting the neo-realistic style that Italian directors like Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini were made popular at the time.
In capturing the atmosphere of the beleaguered city in his film, Reed was helped along by city officials and inhabitants. On nights when rain was unavailable to give the cobblestone streets the appropriate glistening sheen, the city would provide a fire brigade to wet things down. Reed used many residents as extras such as the often glimpsed balloon seller. For the grand final of the film, the Vienna Police had a special unit to patrol the city's sewer system, as its network of interlocking tunnels made great hiding places for criminals and stolen property. The police officers in the film were off-duty members of that unit. The final scene was also the subject of a dispute between David O. Selznick, who wanted the happy ending of the novella, and Reed, who stubbornly refused to end the film on what he felt was an artificially happy note. Graham Greene later wrote: "One of the very few major disputes between Carol Reed and myself concerned the ending, and he has been proved triumphantly right." The Third Man ends as it begins, in a cemetery, and then Calloway gives Holly a ride back to town. They pass Anna walking on the roadside. Holly asks to be let out of the jeep. He stands under a tree, waiting for her. She walks toward him, past him, and then out of frame, never looking. After a long pause, Holly lights a cigarette and wearily throws away the match. Reed kept the camera running, making it an unusual and perfect long shot.
French postcard in the Collection Cinéma by Editions Art & Scène, Paris, 1996, no. CAN 01. Orson Welles in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
Chinese postcard. Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
Publicity still of Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949). Collection: Doctor Macro's.
He’ll have in you a dither with his zither!
Carol Reed had three separate film units working most days of production: a daytime unit, a nighttime unit and a sewer unit. Reed insisted upon directing each unit, resulting in him working 20-hour days. Orson Welles worked for one week on the film and is on screen for only about five minutes. Once he finally arrived in Vienna, Welles refused to film various scenes in the sewers. Due to his protests, various sets replicating the Vienna sewers had to be constructed by Alexander Korda on sound stages back in England. It has long been rumoured that Orson Welles wrote all of Harry Lime's dialogue and even that he took over the direction of his scenes. In a 1967 interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles said that his involvement was minimal: "It was Carol's picture".
That Orson Welles wrote most of Lime's dialogue was also a fabrication. Welles' contributions were Lime's grumbling about his stomach problems which were improvisations and the famous cuckoo clock spiel at the end of the Ferris wheel scene. Welles famously says: “You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!” The cuckoo clock remark has later been traced back to the essayist Walter Pate and when the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to Welles that they've never made any cuckoo clocks, as the clocks are native to the German Black Forest. Since Welles refused to be filmed in Vienna's sewers, his close-ups were shot in London Film Studios, while a body double was used for the wide shots. The resulting footage is said to be about 85% Vienna, and 15% London. In the Vienna sewer location scenes Harry's breath is visible (it was cold down there), but in the sewer scenes shot in London his breaths are not visible. The scene showing the waning moments of Lime's life in which he extends his fingers futilely towards freedom from below through a grill in a street was suggested by Welles. While he was not in Vienna at the time, the hand belonged to Carol Reed.
As the production grew difficult, Alexander Korda and David O. Selznick decided to take it one film at a time. Ironically, due to the success of the film, since both producers were at each other's throats for the credit for the film, they never collaborated again. Roger Ebert in his review of The Third Man: "Reed and his Academy Award-winning cinematographer, Robert Krasker, devised a reckless, unforgettable visual style. More shots, I suspect, are tilted than are held straight; they suggest a world out of joint. There are fantastic oblique angles. Wide-angle lenses distort faces and locations. And the bizarre lighting makes the city into an expressionist nightmare." Another asset of the film is the score. There are apocryphal stories abound Reed discovering musician Anton Karas while scouring Vienna bars and nightclubs. Reed heard Karas playing at a production party and insisted the Austrian zither player come to his hotel room and record some songs to use for the film. Later in production, Reed realised he wanted to use Karas' music for the whole film and flew Karas out to London to record the score. Additional music for the film was written by the Australian-born composer Hubert Clifford under the pseudonym of Michael Sarsfield. From 1944 until 1950 Clifford was Musical Director for Korda at London Film Productions.
By the time David O. Selznick released the film in the U.S., in February 1950, Karas’s 'Harry Lime Theme' was already an international sensation. O’Selznick capitalised on this by including the tagline, "Featuring the Famous Zither Score by Anton Karas... He’ll have in you a dither with his zither!" in the American ad campaign and trailers. Karas became a top-selling musician thanks to the film and opened a nightclub called ‘The Third Man’ in Vienna, which he ran to the end of his days. The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) was the most popular film in the UK in 1949. The British version featured an introductory voice-over by Carol Reed. The voice-over was necessary to explain the very unusual status of Vienna in the aftermath of World War II. However, when the film was initially distributed in America, David O. Selznick had replaced Reed’s narration with a narration read by Joseph Cotten, in character as Holly Martins. Nearly eleven minutes of film were cut in Selznick's version, to give the film a tighter pace. He cut all references to Holly Martins being an implied alcoholic and anything else that portrayed him as a less-than-heroic figure. The British version runs 104 minutes and the American version 93 minutes. Both versions have been released on video, but the most common is the longer British cut.
Joseph Cotten reprised his role as Holly Martins in the one-hour Theatre Guild on the Air radio adaptation in 1951. Orson Welles starred in the British radio series ‘The Adventures of Harry Lime‘ (1951-1952) created as a prequel to the film. The series was also broadcast in the United States as ‘The Lives of Harry Lime’. Later followed a television spin-off, the series, The Third Man (1959–1965). In the 1949 film, Harry is a charming, totally amoral character. In the 1951 radio series, he is a charming adventurer of dubious reputation who is not as immoral as people think he is. In the TV show, as played by Michael Rennie, he's a rather conservative businessman whose reputation seems to have been a case of mistaken identity. Today, you can do a canal tour in Vienna called ‘Der Dritte Man -Tour’. It visits the places where the scenes of Harry Lime being chased by the police were shot. The tunnels featured in the film are part of the Wienkanal, which channels the Wien River through central Vienna out to the Danube River. The main tunnel is the huge arched structure through which the river flows a distance of about 1.6km. The gated side passages are connections to a wet-weather sewer overflow, and the chamber with the balconies is the overflow point. The spiral staircase is one of 6 exits from the main culvert. Events are occasionally held down the tunnels in commemoration of The Third Man and its characters.
British postcard by Cinema. Image: French affiche by Filmsonor for The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949) with Orson Welles. The French titel is Le troisième homme.
British postcard in the Picturegoer Serie, no. W 792. Photo: British Lion. Joseph Cotten in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
Yugoslavian postcard by Sedma Sila. Photo: Morava Film, Beograd (Belgrade). Alida Valli as Anna in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
Dutch postcard. Trevor Howard in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
Sources: Roger Ebert (RogerEbert.com), Wikipedia, and IMDb.
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