The Third Man is a 1949 British film noir directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard. The film is set in post–World War II Vienna. It centres on Holly Martins, an American who is given a job in Vienna by his friend Harry Lime, but when Holly arrives in Vienna he gets the news that Lime is dead. Martins then meets with Lime's acquaintances in an attempt to investigate what he considers a suspicious death.
The Third Man | |
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Theatrical release poster | |
Directed by | Carol Reed |
Produced by |
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Screenplay by | Graham Greene |
Starring |
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Narrated by |
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Music by | Anton Karas |
Cinematography | Robert Krasker |
Edited by | Oswald Hafenrichter |
Production company | London Films |
Distributed by |
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Release date |
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Running time | 108 minutes |
Country |
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Language |
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Box office | £277,549 (UK) |
The atmospheric use of black-and-white expressionist cinematography by Robert Krasker, with harsh lighting and distorted "Dutch angle" camera technique, is a major feature of The Third Man. Combined with the iconic 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.
Greene wrote the novella of the same name as preparation for the screenplay. Anton Karas wrote and performed the score, which featured only the zither. The title music "The Third Man Theme" topped the international music charts in 1950, bringing the previously unknown performer international fame. It is considered one of the greatest films of all time, celebrated for its acting, musical score and atmospheric cinematography.
In 1999, the British Film Institute voted The Third Man the greatest British film of all time. In 2017 a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers and critics for Time Out magazine saw it ranked the second best British film ever.
Screenplay
Opportunistic racketeering thrives in a damaged and impoverished Allied-occupied Vienna, which is divided into four sectors, each controlled by one of the occupying forces: American, British, French, and Soviet. These powers share the duties of law enforcement in the city. American pulp Western writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) comes to the city seeking his childhood friend, Harry Lime, who has offered him a job. Upon arrival, he discovers that Lime was killed while crossing the street just hours earlier by a speeding truck. Martins attends Lime's funeral, where he meets two British Army Police: Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee), a fan of Martins' pulp novels; and his superior, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who says Lime was a criminal and suggests Martins leave town.
An official of the British occupying forces (Wilfrid Hyde-White) approaches Martins, requesting that he give a lecture and offering to pay for his lodging. Viewing this as an opportunity to clear his friend's name, Martins decides to remain in Vienna. At a meeting with Lime's friend, "Baron" Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), Kurtz tells Martins that after the accident he and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer) carried the dying Lime to the side of the street. Lime asked Kurtz and Popescu to take care of Martins and Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), Lime's actress girlfriend.
To learn more, Martins goes to see Anna at the theatre where she is performing; she suggests Harry's death may not have been accidental. They question the porter at Lime's apartment building: Lime died immediately and was carried off the street by someone else in addition to Lime's two friends. Martins berates the porter for not being more forthcoming with the police about what he knows. Concerned for his family's safety, the porter indignantly tells Martins not to involve him. The police, searching Anna's flat for evidence, find and confiscate her forged passport and detain her. Anna tells Martins that she is of Czechoslovak nationality and will be deported from Austria by the Soviet occupying forces if discovered.
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 recognizes him as having argued with the porter earlier and points this out to the gathering bystanders, who become hostile, and then mob-like. Escaping from them, Martins returns to the hotel, and a cab whisks him away. He fears it is taking him to his death but takes him to the book club. With no lecture prepared, he stumbles until Popescu, in the audience, asks him about his next book. Martins replies 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 is investigated. Calloway reluctantly reveals that Lime had been stealing penicillin from military hospitals, and selling it on the black market diluted so much that many patients died. In postwar Vienna, antibiotics were new and scarce outside military hospitals and commanded a very high price. Calloway's evidence convinces Martins. Disillusioned, he agrees to leave Vienna.
Martins visits Anna to say good-bye and finds that she also knows of Lime's misdeeds, but that her feelings toward him are unchanged. She tells him she is to be deported. Upon leaving her flat, he notices someone watching from a dark doorway; a neighbour's lit window briefly reveals the person to be Lime (Orson Welles), who flees, ignoring Martins's calls. Martins summons Calloway, who deduces that Lime has escaped through the sewers. The British police immediately exhume Lime's coffin and discover that the body is that of Joseph Harbin, an orderly who stole penicillin for Lime and was reported missing after turning informant.
Martins goes to Kurtz and demands to see Lime. Lime comes out to meet him and they ride Vienna's Ferris wheel, the Wiener Riesenrad. Lime indirectly threatens Martins's life but relents when told that the police already know his death and funeral were faked. In a monologue on the insignificance of his victims, he reveals the full extent of his amorality. 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, brain-damaged as a result of meningitis.
Lime sneaks out for his rendezvous with Martins, but Anna, still loyal to Lime, arrives and warns him off just in time. 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 in the cemetery to speak to Anna. She approaches him from a distance and walks past, ignoring him.
- Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins
- Alida Valli (credited as Valli) as Anna Schmidt
- Orson Welles as Harry Lime
- Trevor Howard as Major Calloway
- Paul Hörbiger as Karl, Lime's porter (credited as Paul Hoerbiger)
- Ernst Deutsch as "Baron" Kurtz
- Erich Ponto as Dr. Winkel
- Siegfried Breuer as Popescu
- Hedwig Bleibtreu as Anna's old landlady
- Bernard Lee as Sergeant Paine
- Wilfrid Hyde-White as Crabbin
Uncredited
- Annie Rosar as the porter's wife
- Alexis Chesnakov as Brodsky, Russian official
- Herbert Halbik as Little Hansel - Boy with Ball
- Robert Brown as British Military Policeman in Sewer Chase
- Paul Hardtmuth as the hall porter at Hotel Sacher
- Geoffrey Keen as British Military Policeman
- Eric Pohlmann as waiter at Smolka's
- Reed De Rouen as American Military Policeman at Railroad Station
- Brother Theodore as Man on Street
- Nelly Arno as Kurtz's mother
- Karel Št?pánek as actor at Josefstadt Theatre
- Joseph Cotten as the narrator (pre-1999 US version)
- Carol Reed as the narrator (pre-1999 UK, and all post-'99 versions)
- Charles Winchester as the Thug (Post-1999 UK, and all post-'99 versions)
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 under the same name as the film. In 1948 he met Elizabeth Montagu in Vienna. She gave him tours of the city, its sewers and some of its less reputable night-clubs. She also introduced Greene to Peter Smolka, the eastern European correspondent for The Times. Smolka gave Greene the stories about the black market in Vienna.
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' given 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. In the book, Anna does walk away from Lime's grave, 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 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."
David O. Selznick's contribution, according to himself, was mainly to have provided his actors Cotten and Welles and to have produced the US-version, less to the co-writing of the script with Reed and Greene.
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, " 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 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 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 Th
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