The Third Man (Alexander Korda Productions, London Films, Vanguard, Selznick Releasing Organization, filmed 1949, released 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. I turned on Turner Classic Movies for an intriguing presentation of the 1949 thriller The Third Man, a legendary film starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli (though David O. Selznick, who had both her and Cotten under contract, was still billing her just by her last name, “Valli”), Orson Welles and Trevor Howard. The film was a co-production of Alexander Korda’s British-based London Films and David O. Selznick’s Vanguard company, and Korda hired Graham Greene to write an original script because the previous year Korda had had great success with an adaptation of Greene’s novel The Fallen Idol. (Greene hadn’t liked any of the previous films of his books, including This Gun for Hire, Ministry of Fear — though that’s a quite good wartime espionage thriller with Fritz Lang directing and showing off where Alfred Hitchcock got his style – and the sporadically interesting but mostly inept Confidential Agent – but he had quite liked The Fallen Idol.)

The story Greene came up with was set in Vienna in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the city (like Berlin) was divided into four occupation zones each run by one of the victorious Allied powers – the U.S., Britain, France and the Soviet Union. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten, who ended up with the role after Cary Grant, James Stewart and Robert Mitchum either turned it down or, in Mitchum’s case, were unavailable because of his 1949 marijuana arrest) is an American writer of pulp Westerns (one of his books is called Oklahoma Kid, an in-joke because Warner Bros. had made a film called The Oklahoma Kid in 1939 which Bay Area film programmer Tom Luddy called “a gangster picture in Western drag” and its script had been written by Robert Buckner, who turned up as an associate producer on The Third Man) who turns up in Vienna to take a job he’s been offered by Harry Lime, a friend since high school but someone he’d been separated from by the war and hadn’t seen in years. Lime apparently offered Martins a job as a promo writer for his medical charity, but when he arrives he finds that Lime is dead and he shows up just in time to watch Lime’s funeral.

Martins meets various people who were close to Lime, including his porter Karl (Paul Hörbiger); Dr. Winkel (Erich Ponto), who was Lime’s personal physician and who also pronounced him dead; “Baron” Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch); a Romanian named Popescu (Siegfried Breuer); and, most important, Lime’s girlfriend, actress Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). Martins learns that Lime was run over by a truck outside his apartment building but he gets contradictory accounts as to whether he was killed instantly or he lingered long enough to give instructions to his friends on what to do about Holly and Anna before he died. These pique Martins’ curiosity and he decides to remain in Vienna to investigate. He’s got two problems staying on – he’s broke (Lime sent him his plane fare but not much more) and Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), the head of the police in the British sector, is determined to get rid of him because he was investigating Lime as a major criminal and wants to capture the rest of Lime’s gang without a naïve American writer getting in the way. Martins gets bailed out financially by Crabbin (Wilfred Hyde-White), a cultural exchange official who hears a prominent American writer is staying in Vienna and offers to put him up if he’ll give a lecture on the crisis of faith in English-language literature – a plot gimmick Greene obviously borrowed from John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and the 1935 film Alfred Hitchcock made from it, in which Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay is forced to impersonate a politician at a public speech and is able to pull it off by simply spouting stupid political-speech clichés. (In The Third Man we don’t get to hear Holly’s speech, just him stumbling through a Q&A session in which he’s asked about James Joyce and names Zane Grey as the writer who most influenced him – which Crabbin treats as if he were joking – until Holly outlines his suspicions about Lime’s death as if they were the plot of his latest novel.)

Eventually, after Major Calloway shows Lime a series of slides showing what Lime was really up to – he and a confederate working at a British-run hospital, Joseph Harbin, were stealing penicillin, diluting it and reselling it to hospitals, with the result that people, including children, were dying of diseases they would have recovered from if they’d received full doses – Holly stumbles on the truth: Harry Lime is still alive. He murdered Joseph Harbin and faked his own death – later when the body is exhumed it’s Harbin, not Lime, in the coffin – and in a famous scene at the Ferris wheel in Vienna’s famous amusement park, the Prater, Lime confronts Holly and tells him he’s the only person who knows his secrets since he’s dispatched all the others (including the porter, who was pitched out of the window of Lime’s old apartment in a killing of which Holly is suspected), offers him a share of the racket, says he wants to meet with him somewhere but “it’s you I want to see, not the police,” and as they’re saying goodbye utters the famous lines, “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..”

Everyone associated with making the film – including producer Korda, director Carol Reed, and writer Greene – acknowledged that Orson Welles supplied those lines himself (though Welles admitted he’d borrowed some of them from an old Hungarian play, which he didn’t name), and they’ve been acclaimed as some of the greatest words ever written for a film, but they come off not only due to Welles’ skills as a writer but as an actor as well. He’s able to deliver the lines in such a way that when he gets to the words “the cuckoo clock,” he pushes his usual basso profondo up to falsetto so when he says “cuckoo clock,” he sounds like one. (Later we watched the film Black Magic, set in France a decade or so before the Revolution, with Orson Welles as Cagliostro and a hapless Louis XVI shown trying to repair a cuckoo clock. So we got two movies involving both Orson Welles and cuckoo clocks.) Ultimately Holly agrees to set up Lime so the police can catch him, but Anna – who’s still in love with him even though Lime made clear to Holly he had no interest in her beyond a sexual plaything – gives the game away and Lime ends up running for his life through the Vienna sewers. Whole squadrons of British police descend into the sewers to catch him, but eventually it is Holly who shoots him down.

Graham Greene’s original story had Holly and Anna end up together as a couple, but director Reed and producer Korda both thought the story needed a more bittersweet ending and overruled Greene, setting up the famous final scene in which Holly, on his way out of Vienna, accosts Anna on a tree-lined path and, still pissed at him for getting Lime killed, will have nothing to do with him. The scene is supposed to take place in autumn and feature leaves falling from the trees, but it was already the dead of winter and the trees on the street they were using had lost all their leaves – so director Reed had to station stagehands on cranes just above camera range to drop leaves down in the general direction of the actors. (The business of the two endings can’t help but remind me of Casablanca, whose writers actually wrote an ending in which the Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman characters got together; the intent was to shoot both ending, preview them and find out which one the audiences liked best, but after they shot the first ending – the one we all know – they decided that was the way the story had to end and they never shot the alternate version.)

The Third Man was directed by Carol Reed, but like a lot of other directors who worked with Orson Welles he was quite clearly influenced by Welles’ own directorial style – all those elaborate tracking shots, chiaroscuro lighting and off-kilter camera angles (Reed and cinematographer Robert Krasker, who won the Academy Award for his work, shot so much of the movie with a tilted camera that according to imdb.com Reed got at least two spirit levels – one from the Third Man crew and one from director William Wyler – as gag gifts) – and the film itself has striking parallels to Welles’ own movies in general and Citizen Kane in particular. In one scene, as Holly is chasing Lime, he bursts into Lime’s old apartment, now empty, and is bitten on the finger by what’s describes as a parrot but is pretty clearly a cockatiel – the same bird that occurs in Citizen Kane to express Kane’s anguish over his wife leaving him. Indeed, I’ve long felt that the whole relationship between the characters played here by Joseph Cotten and Welles mirrors the relationship between their characters in Kane – long-time friends who suddenly break when Cotten’s character feels that Welles’ has lost their shared ideals and become irredeemably corrupt. And the device of having Holly won over to the police side by seeing slides of the victims of Lime’s penicillin racket evokes the films-within-the-film used for key exposition in both Citizen Kane and The Stranger.

Even the opening narration (spoken by Carol Reed in the British version of the film – the one TCM was showing – and, I think more appropriately, by Cotten in character in the U.S. version David Selznick re-edited) – “I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better” – references a previous film in the Welles canon, the 1943 spy thriller Journey Into Fear, which took place in Constantinople (or, to use its modern name, Istanbul) and in which Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles co-starred. (Norman Foster was officially credited as director of Journey Into Fear, but Welles reportedly directed key scenes, including all the ones in which his character, Turkish police chief Col. Haki, appears.) Welles’ fingerprints are so obvious in a lot of the movies he ostensibly just acted in but didn’t direct (including the 1943 Jane Eyre, in which he starred as Rochester and Robert Stevenson was the ostensible director, but during one scene of Rochester outdoors riding a horse through a wood in a storm, I couldn’t help but joke, “This looks much more like the work of the man who made Citizen Kane than the man who made Mary Poppins”) that rumors persist that Welles himself directed all or part of The Third Man.

Nobody actually involved in making the film recalled it that way, but I suspect it’s because Carol Reed was a highly derivative director who was always sucking off the marrow of more talented filmmakers – Alfred Hitchcock in his 1939 film Night Train to Munich, John Ford in The Stars Look Down and Odd Man Out, David Lean in Oliver! and Orson Welles here. One thing Reed was apparently responsible for was the film’s unique musical score, played by Anton Karas entirely on zither. Accounts differ as to just how Reed found Karas – whether he was playing on the Vienna streets, in a café or at a party for the production – but Reed heard Karas’s music as the perfect compliment to the film. Though there are a couple of spots in which other music is heard as “source” – a brief cabaret dance to a song from 1946 (though it sounds like a 1920’s piece) called “Managua, Nicaragua” by Irving Fields and Albert Gamse, and a violin piece heard in a club that sounds like one of the Strausses but was actually “Das Alte Lied” (which literally means “The Old Song”!) by Henry Love with lyrics by Fritz Löhner-Beda – for the most part the only instrument heard is Karas’s zither. He was brought to London to record the score not only for the movie but for a record issued by British Decca, which had become severed from U.S. Decca during the war and had just launched its own U.S. label, London Records. The success of the “Third Man Theme” recording (it sold millions worldwide) not only promoted the film, it put the London Records label on the map in the U.S., and Reed and Korda savvily used the zither as a visual as well as an audio motif: the opening credits are seen over vibrating zither strings.

The Third Man routinely gets on best-films-ever lists – it was supposedly number five on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest crime thrillers of all time (though I have no idea what films came in numbers one through four, if the 1941 The Maltese Falcon wasn’t number one I’m going to demand a recount!) – and there’s a story on the imdb.com “Trivia” page on it that as a film student Martin Scorsese did a long analytical paper on The Third Man and got a B-plus on it, with his teacher docking him because “it’s just a thriller.” It’s still a marvelous movie and, even though he didn’t direct it, a major entry in the Orson Welles canon.