The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir, directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard. It is considered one of the greatest films of all time, celebrated for its atmospheric cinematography, performances, and musical score. Novelist Graham Greene wrote the screenplay and subsequently published the novella of the same name (originally written as preparation for the screenplay). Anton Karas wrote and performed the score, which used only the zither; its title music "The Third Man Theme" topped the international music charts in 1950, bringing the then-unknown performer international fame.
Plot
American pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in Allied-occupied Vienna seeking his childhood friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has offered him a job. Upon arrival he discovers that Lime was killed just days earlier by a speeding car while crossing the street. Martins attends Lime's funeral, where he meets two British Army Police: Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee), a fan of Martins' pulp fiction, and his superior, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who says Lime was a criminal and suggests Martins leave town.
A book club subsequently approaches Martins, requesting that he give a lecture to the club and offering to pay for his lodging. Viewing this as an opportunity to clear Lime's name, Martins decides to remain in Vienna. He encounters Lime's friend, "Baron" Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), who tells Martins that he, along with another mutual friend, Popescu (Siegfried Breuer), carried Lime to the side of the street after the accident. Before dying, Lime asked Baron and Popescu to take care of Martins and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), Lime's actress girlfriend.
Beginning to suspect that Lime's death was not an accident, Martins goes to see Anna. She accompanies Martins to question the porter at Lime's apartment building. The porter claims Lime was killed immediately and could not have given instructions before dying. He also states that a third man helped carry the body. Martins berates the porter for not being more forthcoming with the police with what he knows. The police, searching Anna's flat for evidence, find and confiscate her forged passport and detain her.
Martins visits Lime's "medical adviser", Dr Winkel (Erich Ponto), who says that he arrived at the accident after Lime was dead, and only two men were present. Later, the porter secretly offers Martins more information but is murdered before their arranged meeting. When Martins arrives, unaware of the murder, a young boy recognises him as having argued with the porter earlier and points this out to the gathering bystanders, who become hostile, then mob-like. Escaping from them, Martins returns to the hotel, and a cab immediately takes him away. He fears the cab will take him to his death, but the cab takes Martins to the book club. From the audience, Popescu asks him about his next book, and Martins retorts that it will be called The Third Man, "a murder story" inspired by facts. Popescu tells Martins that he should stick to fiction. Martins sees two thugs approaching and flees.
Calloway again advises Martins to leave Vienna, but Martins refuses and demands that Lime's death be investigated. Calloway reluctantly reveals that Lime was a black marketeer, who greatly diluted penicillin he stole from military hospitals and sold it on the black market, killing many. In postwar Vienna, antibiotics were new and scarce outside military hospitals and commanded a very high price. Calloway's evidence convinces Martins, who agrees to leave.
Martins learns that Anna will be deported to the Soviet sector of Vienna. Upon leaving her apartment, he notices someone watching from a dark doorway; a neighbour's lit window briefly reveals the person to be Lime, who flees, ignoring Martins' calls. Martins summons Calloway, who deduces that Lime has escaped through the sewers. The British police exhume Lime's coffin and discover that the body is that of Joseph Harbin, an orderly who stole penicillin for Lime.
The next day, Martins meets with Lime, and they ride Vienna's Ferris wheel, the Wiener Riesenrad. Lime obliquely threatens Martins, and in a monologue on the insignificance of his victims, reveals the full extent of his ruthlessness. He again offers a job to Martins and leaves. Calloway asks Martins to help lure Lime out to capture him, and Martins agrees, asking for Anna's safe conduct out of Vienna in exchange. However, Anna refuses to leave and remains loyal to Lime. Exasperated, Martins decides to leave but changes his mind after Calloway shows Martins the children who are victims of Lime's diluted penicillin, now dying of meningitis.
Lime arrives at his rendezvous with Martins, but Anna warns Lime. He tries again to escape through the sewers, but the police are there in force. Lime shoots and kills Paine, but Calloway shoots and wounds Lime. Badly injured, Lime drags himself up a ladder to a street grating exit but cannot lift it. Martins picks up Paine's revolver, follows Lime, reaches him, but hesitates. Lime looks at him and nods. A shot is heard. Later, Martins attends Lime's second funeral. At the risk of missing his flight out of Vienna, Martins waits to speak to Anna. She approaches him from considerable distance, but she ignores him and walks past him.
Cast
- Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins
- Alida Valli as Anna Schmidt
- Orson Welles as Harry Lime
- Trevor Howard as Major Calloway
- Bernard Lee as Sergeant Paine
- Wilfrid Hyde-White as Crabbin
- Erich Ponto as Dr Winkel
- Ernst Deutsch as "Baron" Kurtz
- Siegfried Breuer as Popescu
- Paul Hörbiger as Karl, Lime's porter
- Hedwig Bleibtreu as Anna's landlady
- Robert Brown as British Military Policeman in Sewer Chase
- Alexis Chesnakov as Brodsky
- Herbert Halbik as Hansl
- Paul Hardtmuth as the hall porter at Hotel Sacher
- Geoffrey Keen as British Military Policeman
- Eric Pohlmann as waiter at Smolka's
- Annie Rosar as the porter's wife
- Joseph Cotten as the narrator (pre-1999 US version)
- Carol Reed as the narrator (pre-1999 UK, and all post-'99 versions)
Style
The atmospheric use of black-and-white expressionist cinematography by Robert Krasker, with harsh lighting and distorted "Dutch angle" 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. Some critics at the time criticised the film's unusual camera angles. 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, Reed's close friend, 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?"
Production
Development
Before writing the screenplay, Graham Greene worked out the atmosphere, characterisation, and mood of the story by writing a novella. He wrote it as a source text for the screenplay and never intended it to be read by the general public, although it was later published 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 appears in a modified form at the film's beginning in Reed's voice-over: "I never knew the old Vienna". Other differences include both Martins' and Lime's nationalities; 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. The screenplay's original draft replaced him with two characters, played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, but ultimately in the film, as in the novella, Crabbin remains a single character.
There is also a difference of ending. The novella's implies that Anna and Martins are about to begin a new life together, in stark contrast to the unmistakable snub by Anna that closes the film. Anna does walk away from Lime'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 â€" 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 Reed and David O. Selznick, who stubbornly refused to end the film on what they felt was an artificially happy note. 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."
Through the years there was occasional speculation that Welles, rather than Reed, was the de facto director of The Third Man. In film scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum's 2007 book Discovering Orson Welles, Rosenbaum calls it a "popular misconception", although Rosenbaum did note that the film "began to echo the Wellesian theme of betrayed male friendship and certain related ideas from Citizen Kane." 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." Welles himself fuelled this theory in a 1958 interview, 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". However, in a 1967 interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles said that his involvement was minimal: "It was Carol's picture". 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 Manâ€" and, in fact, the whole filmâ€"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.
Principal photography
Six weeks of principal photography was shot on location in Vienna, ending on 11 December 1948. Production then moved to the Worton Hall Studios in Isleworth and Shepperton studios near London and was completed in March 1949.
The scenes of Harry Lime in the sewer were shot on location or on sets built at Shepperton; most of the location shots used doubles for Welles. However, Reed claimed that, despite initial reluctance, Welles quickly became enthusiastic, and stayed in Vienna to finish the film. The crew sprayed water on the cobbled streets to make them reflect light at night.
Reed had four different camera units shooting around Vienna for the duration of the production. He worked around the clock, using Benzedrine to stay awake.
"Swiss cuckoo clock" speech
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, and says that it would be insignificant if one of them or a few of them "stopped moving, forever". Back on the ground, he notes:
- You know what the fellow said â€" 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 â€" and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Welles added this remark â€" in the published script, it is in a footnote. Greene wrote in a letter "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"â€"in any event the idea is not original to Welles, acknowledged by the phrase "what the fellow said".
The likeliest source is the painter Whistler. In a lecture on art from 1885 (published in Mr Whistler's 'Ten O'Clock' [1888]), he 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 a 1916 reminiscence, American painter Theodore Wores said that he "tried to get an acknowledgment from Whistler that San Francisco would some day become a great art center on account of our climatic, scenic and other advantages. 'But environment does not lead to a production of art,' Whistler retorted. 'Consider Switzerland. There the people have everything in the form of natural advantages - mountains, valleys and blue sky. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock!"
This is Orson Welles (1993) quotes Welles: "When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they've never made any cuckoo clocks", as the clocks are native to the German Black Forest. Writer John McPhee pointed out that when the Borgias flourished in Italy, Switzerland was "the most powerful and feared military force in Europe", not the peacefully neutral country that it would later become.
Score
Anton Karas composed the musical score and played it on the zither. Before the production came to Vienna, Karas was an unknown performer in local Heurigers. According Time:
The picture demanded music appropriate to post-World War II Vienna, but director Reed had made up his mind to avoid schmalzy, heavily orchestrated waltzes. In Vienna one night Reed listened to a wine-garden zitherist named Anton Karas, [and] was fascinated by the jangling melancholy of his music.
Reed brought Karas to London, where the musician worked with Reed on the score for six weeks. 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?"
Differences between releases
As the original British release begins, the voice of director Carol Reed (uncredited) describes post-war Vienna from a racketeer's point of view. The version shown in American cinemas cut eleven minutes of footage and replaced Reed's voice-over with narration by Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins. David O. Selznick instituted the replacement because he did not think American audiences would relate to the seedy tone of the original. Today, Reed's original version appears on American DVDs, in showings on Turner Classic Movies, and in US 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.
Reception
Box office
In the United Kingdom, The Third Man was the most popular movie at the British box office for 1949. In Austria, "local critics were underwhelmed", and the film ran for only a few weeks. Still, the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung, although critical of a "not-too-logical plot", praised the film's "masterful" depiction of a "time out of joint" and the city's atmosphere of "insecurity, poverty and post-war immorality". 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."
Critical reception
Upon its release in Britain and America, the film received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time magazine said that the film was "crammed with cinematic plums that would do the early Hitchcock proudâ€"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." 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 also runs lightly through the film, touching the darker depressions with little glints of the gay or macabre." One very rare exception was the British communist paper Daily Worker (later the Morning Star), which complained that "no effort is spared to make the Soviet authorities as sinister and unsympathetic as possible."
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." In a special episode of Siskel & Ebert in 1994 discussing movie villains, Ebert named Lime as his favourite movie villain. Gene Siskel remarked that it was an "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.
Vince Gilligan said the film was among his top three favorites, if not his favorite.
Soundtrack release
"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. Following its release in the US in 1950 (see 1950 in music), "The Third Man Theme" spent eleven weeks at number one on Billboard '​s US Best Sellers in Stores chart, from 29 April to 8 July. The exposure made Anton Karas an international star, 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".
Awards and honours
The Third Man won the 1949 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 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. In 2005, viewers of BBC Television's Newsnight Review voted the film their fourth favourite of all time, the only film in the top five made before 1970.
The film also placed 57th on the American Film Institute's list of top American films in 1998, though the film's only American connections were its executive co-producer David O. Selznick and its actors Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten. The other two executive co-producers, Sir Alexander Korda and Carol Reed, were Hungarian and British, respectively. In June 2008, the American Film Institute (AFI) revealed its 10 Top 10â€"the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genresâ€"after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. The Third Man was acknowledged as the fifth best film in the mystery genre. The film also made the following AFI lists:
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies â€" No. 57
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills â€" No. 75
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:
- Harry Lime â€" No. 37 Villain
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
- "In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, and they had 500 years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." â€" Nominated
- AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores â€" Nominated
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) â€" Nominated
- 10 Top 10 â€" No. 5 mystery film
Copyright status
In the United Kingdom, films of this vintage are copyright protected as dramatic works until seventy years after the end of the year in which that last "principal author" died. The principal authors are generally the writer/s, director/s, or composer/s of original work, and since in the case of The Third Man Graham Greene died in 1991, the film is protected until the end of 2061.
This film lapsed into public domain in the United States when the copyright was not renewed after David Selznick's death. In 1996, the Uruguay Round Agreements Act restored the film's US copyright protection to StudioCanal Image UK 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, now out of print, and in September 2010, Lions Gate reissued the film on Blu-ray.
On 18 January 2012, the US Supreme Court ruled in Golan v. Holder that the copyright clause of the American Constitution does not prevent the US from meeting its treaty obligations towards copyright protection for foreign works. Following the ruling, notable films such as The Third Man and The 39 Steps were taken back out of the public domain and became fully protected under American copyright law. Under current US copyright law, The Third Man remains under copyright until 1 January 2045.
Adaptations
Joseph Cotten reprised his role as Holly Martins in the one-hour Theater Guild on the Air radio adaptation of The Third Man on 7 January 1951. The Third Man was also adapted as a one-hour radio play on two broadcasts of Lux Radio Theater: on 9 April 1951 with Joseph Cotten reprising his role and on 8 February 1954 with Ray Milland as Martins.
A British radio drama series, The Adventures of Harry Lime (broadcast in the US as The Lives of Harry Lime), created as a "prequel" to the film, centres on Lime's adventures prior to his "death in Vienna", and Welles reprises his role as Lime. Fifty-two episodes 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 Third Man. Recordings of the 1952 episodes "Man of Mystery", "Murder on the Riviera", and "Blackmail is a Nasty Word" are also included on the Criterion Collection DVD The Complete Mr. Arkadin.
A television spin-off starring Michael Rennie as Harry Lime ran for five seasons beginning in 1959. Seventy-seven episodes were filmed, and the directors included Paul Henreid (10 episodes) and Arthur Hiller (six episodes). Jonathan Harris played sidekick Bradford Webster for 72 episodes, and Roger Moore guest starred in the instalment "The Angry Young Man", which Hiller directed.
See also
- BFI Top 100 British films
- Schönlaterngasse
- Third Man Records
References
Notes
Bibliography
External links
- The Third Man at the Internet Movie Database
- Third Man Private Collection (3mpc) Museum Dedicated to 'The Third Man'
- The Third Man tour
- "The Lives of Harry Lime" Radio Series
- The Third Man locations
- The Third Man on Theater Guild on the Air: 7 January 1951
- The Third Man on Lux Radio Theater: 9 April 1951