| The Third Man | |
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Cinema release poster |
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| Directed by | Carol Reed |
| Produced by | Carol Reed Uncredited: Alexander Korda David O. Selznick |
| Written by | Graham Greene |
| Starring | Joseph Cotten Alida Valli Orson Welles Trevor Howard |
| Music by | Anton Karas |
| Cinematography | Robert Krasker |
| Editing by | Oswald Hafenrichter |
| Distributed by | British Lion Films (UK), Selznick International Pictures (US) |
| Release date(s) | 2 September 1949 |
| Running time | 104 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard. Many critics rank it as a masterpiece, particularly remembered for its atmospheric cinematography, performances, and unique musical score.[1] The screenplay was written by novelist Graham Greene, who subsequently published the novella of the same name (which he had originally written as a preparation for the screenplay). Anton Karas wrote and performed the score, which used only the zither; its title cut topped the international music charts in 1950.
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American pulp Western writer Holly Martins arrives in Post-World War II Vienna seeking his childhood friend, Harry Lime, who has offered him a job. Martins discovers that Lime was killed by a car while crossing the street; at Lime's funeral, Martins meets two British Army Police: Sergeant Paine, a fan of Martins's books, and his superior, Major Calloway. Afterwards Martins is asked to give a lecture to a book club a few days later. He then meets a friend of Lime's, Baron Kurtz, who tells Martins that he and another friend, Popescu, carried Lime to the side of the street after the accident, and before he died Lime asked them to take care of Martins and Lime's actress girlfriend, Anna.
Martins goes to see Anna, and becomes suspicious that Lime's death was not an accident. The porter at Lime's apartment building says Lime was killed immediately and that three men carried the body, not two. Martins and Anna discover the police are searching her apartment. They confiscate a forged passport and detain her. The next evening Martins visits Lime's "medical advisor", Dr. Winkel, who says he arrived at the accident after Lime was dead, and only two men were there.
The porter offers to give Martins more information, but is murdered before Martins can see him. Escaping from a hostile crowd, Martins is taken to the book club. He makes a poor speech, but when Popescu asks about Martins's next book he says it will be called The Third Man, "a murder story" inspired by facts. Popescu says Martins should stick to fiction. Martins sees two thugs advancing towards him, and flees.
Calloway again advises Martins to leave Vienna, but Martins refuses and demands Lime's death be investigated. Calloway reveals that Lime's racket was stealing penicillin from military hospitals, diluting it, and selling it on the black market, leading to many deaths. Martins, convinced, agrees to leave.
Martins learns that Anna too has been told about Lime's crimes and is about to be sent to the Russian sector. Leaving her apartment, Martins notices someone watching from a dark doorway. A shaft of light reveals Harry Lime, alive: he flees, ignoring Martins's calls, and vanishes. Martins summons Calloway, who deduces that Lime has escaped through the sewers. The British police exhume Lime's coffin and discover the body is that of the orderly who stole the penicillin for Lime.
The next day, Martins meets with Lime and they ride Vienna's Ferris wheel, the Wiener Riesenrad. Lime obliquely threatens Martins, reveals the full extent of his ruthless callousness, and then reiterates his job offer before hurrying off. Major Calloway then asks Martins to help capture Lime, and Martins agrees, asking for Anna's safe conduct out of Vienna in exchange; but when Anna learns this, she refuses to leave. Exasperated, Martins decides to leave, but en route to the airport Calloway detours to a hospital to show Martins children dying of meningitis that had been treated using Lime's diluted penicillin.
Lime arrives to rendezvous with Martins, but Anna warns him. He tries once again to escape using the sewer tunnels, but the police are there in force. Lime kills Sergeant Paine and is wounded by Major Calloway. Badly injured, Lime drags himself up a ladder to a street grating, but is unable to lift it. Martins then kills him using Paine's revolver. Martins attends Lime's second funeral. At the risk of missing his flight out of Vienna, he waits to speak to Anna, but she ignores him and walks past.
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 at the time. 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?"[2]
Through the years there was occasional speculation that Welles, rather than Reed, was the de facto director of The Third Man. Film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum, in his 2007 book, Discovering Orson Welles, calls it a "popular misconception",[3] although Rosenbaum did note that the film "began to echo the Wellesian theme of betrayed male friendship and certain related ideas from Citizen Kane."[4] In the final analysis, Rosenbaum writes, Welles "didn’t direct anything in the picture; the basics of his shooting and editing style, its music and meaning, are plainly absent. Yet old myths die hard, and some viewers persist in believing otherwise."[4] Welles himself fuelled this theory with an interview he gave in 1958, in which he said that he had had an important role in making The Third Man, but that it was a “delicate matter, because [he] wasn’t the producer”.[5] However, he later admitted in a 1967 interview with Peter Bogdanovich that his involvement was minimal: "It was Carol's picture", he said.[6] However, Welles did contribute some of the film’s best-known dialogue. Bogdanovich also stated in the introduction to the DVD:
However, I think it’s important to note that the look of The Third Man—and, in fact, the whole film—would be unthinkable without Citizen Kane, The Stranger, and The Lady from Shanghai, all of which Orson made in the ’40s, and all of which preceded The Third Man. Carol Reed, I think, was definitely influenced by Orson Welles, the director, from the films he had made.[7]
As the original British release begins, the voice of director Carol Reed, unnamed, is heard describing post-war Vienna from the point of view of a racketeer. The version shown in American cinemas replaced this with narration by Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins. This change was instituted by David O. Selznick, who did not think American audiences would relate to the seedy tone of the original.[8] In addition, eleven minutes of footage were cut.[9] Today, Reed's original version appears on American DVDs, in showings on Turner Classic Movies, and in U.S. cinema releases, with the eleven minutes of footage restored. Both the Criterion Collection and Studio Canal DVD releases include a comparison of the two opening monologues.
Before writing the screenplay, Graham Greene worked out the atmosphere, characterisation, and mood of the story by writing a novella.[10] 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, together with The Fallen Idol.
The narrator in the novella is Major Calloway, 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, as in the novella, Crabbin is a single character.
There is also a difference of ending. In the novella, 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 film. 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 is 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.
Six weeks of principal photography was shot on location in Vienna,[11] ending on 11 December 1948. Production then moved to the Worton Hall Studios in Isleworth[12] and Shepperton studios near London, and was completed in March 1949.[13]
The scenes of Harry Lime in the sewer were shot on location or on sets built at Shepperton, with most of the location shots using doubles for Welles.[14] Reed, however, claimed that despite initial reluctance, Welles quickly became enthusiastic, and stayed in Vienna to finish the film.[15] Water was sprayed on the cobbled streets to make them reflect the light at night.[14]
In Austria, "local critics were underwhelmed"[16] and the film ran for only a few weeks; William Cook, after his 2006 visit to an eight-room museum in Vienna dedicated to the film, wrote "In Britain it's a thriller about friendship and betrayal. In Vienna it's a tragedy about Austria's troubled relationship with its past."[16]
Upon its release in Britain and America, the film received overwhelmingly positive reviews.[17] Time magazine called the film "crammed with cinematic plums that would do the early Hitchcock proud—ingenious twists and turns of plot, subtle detail, full-bodied bit characters, atmospheric backgrounds that become an intrinsic part of the story, a deft commingling of the sinister with the ludicrous, the casual with the bizarre."[18] Bosley Crowther, after a prefatory qualification that the film was "designed [only] to excite and entertain", wrote that Reed "brilliantly packaged the whole bag of his cinematic tricks, his whole range of inventive genius for making the camera expound. His eminent gifts for compressing a wealth of suggestion in single shots, for building up agonized tension and popping surprises are fully exercised. His devilishly mischievous humor (sic) also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre."[19] One of the very rare exceptions was the British communist paper The Daily Worker of 3 September 1949 which complained that "no effort is spared to make the Soviet authorities as sinister and unsympathetic as possible."[20]
Critics today have hailed the film as a masterpiece. Roger Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies" list and wrote, "Of all the movies that I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies."[21] Gene Siskel remarked it as "exemplary piece of moviemaking, highlighting the ruins of WWII and juxtaposing it with the characters' own damaged histories". James Berardinelli has also praised the film, calling the film a "must-see" for lovers of film noir.
What sort of music it is, whether jaunty or sad, fierce or provoking, it would be hard to reckon; but under its enthrallment, the camera comes into play... The unseen zither-player... is made to employ his instrument much as the Homeric bard did his lyre.
The 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. According to a November 1949 Time magazine article:[23]
Reed later brought Karas to London, where the musician spent six weeks working with Reed on the score.[23] Decades later, 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?"[24]
"The Third Man Theme" was released as a single in 1949/50 (Decca in the UK, London Records in the US). It became a best-seller—by November 1949, 300,000 records had been sold in Britain, with the teen-aged Princess Margaret a reported fan.[23] Following its release in the U.S. in 1950 (see 1950 in music), "The Third Man Theme" spent eleven weeks at number one on Billboard's U.S. Best Sellers in Stores chart, from April 29 to July 8.[25] The exposure made Karas an international star,[26] and the trailer for the film stated that "the famous musical score by Anton Karas" would have the audience "in a dither with his zither".[27]
The comedian Victor Borge covered the theme on piano for his 1955 album Caught in the Act, and a version with a faster tempo and without the zither was featured on the 1965 album Going Places by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. The music is also used in a bar scene in the 2002 Vin Diesel action film xXx. Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer's comedy troupe The Lonely Island used a sample of the theme song on the song "Stork Patrol".[28] The theme also is used for the title sequence of "Ebert Presents At the Movies."
The Goon Show parodied the score several times when referring to spy, Vienna or war themes and featured by warping recognisable portions of the score using then new FX methods.
In a famous scene, Lime meets with Martins on the Wiener Riesenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park. Looking down on the people below from his vantage point, Lime compares them to dots. Back on the ground, he notes:
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 added by Welles – in the published script, it is in a footnote. Greene wrote in a letter[29] "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 have 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",[30] as they are in fact German, native to the Black Forest. Writer John McPhee also points out that during the period of time the Borgia flourished in Italy, Switzerland was "the most powerful and feared military force in Europe", and not the peacefully neutral country it is currently.[31]
The Third Man won the 1949 Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival,[32] the British Academy Award for Best Film, and an Academy Award for Best Black and White Cinematography in 1950.
In 1999 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 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 of Hungarian and British origin respectively.) In June 2008, the AFI revealed its "10 Top 10"—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.[33] 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. The "American Film Institute" chose the film in the following categories:
In Vienna there is a 'Third Man Museum' dedicated to the film. [34]
This film lapsed into public domain in the United States when the copyright was not renewed after David Selznick's death. In 1996, the film's U.S. copyright protection was restored by the Uruguay Round Agreements Act,[35], and credited to StudioCanal Image U.K. Ltd.. The Criterion Collection released a digitally restored DVD of the original British print of the film. In 2008 Criterion released a Blu-ray edition,[36] now out of print, and in September 2010 Lions Gate reissued the film on Blu-ray.[27]
The Third Man was adapted as a one-hour radio play on two broadcasts of Lux Radio Theater, first on 9 April 1951 with Joseph Cotten, then on 8 February 1954 with Ray Milland.
A British radio drama series called The Adventures of Harry Lime, which was broadcast in the U.S. as The Lives of Harry Lime, centred on Lime's adventures, voiced by Welles, prior to his "death in Vienna". Fifty-two episodes were aired in 1951 and 1952, several of which Welles wrote, 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 here 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.[37]
In 2011, a pair of bloggers from the Walker Art Center started a web project called Still Dots which analyzes The Third Man by looking at one frame pulled from each 62 seconds of the film, twice a week. The project is slated to finish in December of 2012. [38]
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