The Third Man: Difference between revisions

{{Short description|1949 film by Carol Reed}}

{{About|the film}}

{{Infobox film

| name = The Third Man

| gross = £277,549 (UK) ({{Inflation|UK|277549|1949|r=-3|cursign=£|fmt=eq}})<ref>Vincent Porter, 'The Robert Clark Account', ''Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television'', Vol 20 No 4, 2000 p489</ref>

}}

 

 

Greene wrote a novella as a [[Film treatment|treatment]] for the screenplay. Composer [[Anton Karas]]' title composition "[[The Third Man Theme]]" topped the international music charts in 1950, bringing international fame to the previously unknown performer. ''The Third Man'' is considered one of [[List of films considered the best|the greatest films of all time]], celebrated for its acting, musical score, and atmospheric cinematography.<ref>[[Leslie Halliwell|Halliwell, Leslie]] and John Walker, ed. (1994). ''Halliwell's Film Guide''. New York: Harper Perennial. {{ISBN|0-06-273241-2}}. p 1192.</ref>

Holly Martins, an American author of [[western fiction|Western]] [[Pulp magazine|pulp novels]], arrives in the British sector of [[Allied-occupied Austria|Allied-occupied]] Vienna seeking Harry Lime, a childhood friend who has offered him a job. However, Martins is told that Lime was killed by a car while crossing the street. At Lime's funeral, Martins meets two [[Royal Military Police]] officers: Sergeant Paine, a fan of Martins' novels, and Major Calloway. Afterward, Martins is asked to lecture at 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 that, before he died, Lime asked them to take care of Martins and Lime's girlfriend, actress Anna Schmidt.

 

 

 

 

 

Martins attends Lime's second funeral at the risk of missing his flight out of Vienna. He waits on the road to the cemetery to speak with Anna, but she walks past without glancing in his direction.

* [[Orson Welles]] as Harry Lime

* [[Joseph Cotten]] as Holly Martins

* [[Trevor Howard]] as Major Calloway

* [[Ernst Deutsch]] as "Baron" Kurtz

* [[Erich Ponto]] as Dr. Winkel

 

===Development===

 

 

Through the years there was occasional speculation that Welles was the ''de facto'' director of ''The Third Man'' rather than Reed. Jonathan Rosenbaum's 2007 book ''Discovering Orson Welles'' calls this a "popular misconception",<ref>Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ''Discovering Orson Welles'', University of California Press; 1st edition (2 May 2007), p.25 {{ISBN|0-520-25123-7}}</ref> although Rosenbaum did note that the film "began to echo the Wellesian theme of betrayed male friendship and certain related ideas from ''[[Citizen Kane]]''."<ref name=rosenweb>Rosenbaum, Jonathan. [http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/?p=6466 ''Welles in the Limelight''] ''JonathanRosenbaum.net'' n.p. 30 July 1999. Web. 18 October 2010.</ref> Rosenbaum writes that 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."<ref name=rosenweb/> Welles himself fuelled this theory in a 1958 interview, in which he said "entirely wrote the role" of the Harry Lime character and that he'd had an unspecified role in making the film—more than the contribution he made to ''[[Journey into Fear (1943 film)|Journey into Fear]]''—but that it was a "delicate matter" he did not want to discuss because he wasn't the film's producer.<ref>Welles, Orson; Epstein, Mark W. ''Orson Welles: Interviews''. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Print.</ref> However, in a 1967 interview with [[Peter Bogdanovich]], Welles said that his involvement was minimal: "It was Carol's picture".<ref>Bogdanovich, Peter, ''This Is Orson Welles'', Da Capo Press (21 March 1998) p. 220, {{ISBN|978-0-306-80834-0}}</ref> Welles did contribute some of the film's best-known dialogue. Bogdanovich also stated in the introduction to the DVD:

 

A restored version of the film was released in the United Kingdom on 26 June 2015.<ref name="FT"/>

 

==Reception==

In Austria, "local critics were underwhelmed",<ref name=Cook>{{cite news|newspaper= The Guardian|title=The Third Man's view of Vienna|url= https://www.theguardian.com/film/2006/dec/08/3|last=Cook|first=William|date=8 December 2006|access-date=15 August 2009}}</ref> and the film ran for only a few weeks. The Viennese [[Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna)|''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".<ref>{{cite news|title=Kunst und Kultur. (…) Filme der Woche. Der dritte Mann|access-date=6 June 2012|newspaper=[[Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna)|Arbeiter-Zeitung]]|date=12 March 1950|url=http://www.arbeiter-zeitung.at/cgi-bin/az/flash.pl?seite=19500312_A07;html=1|location=Vienna|page=7|archive-date=17 June 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130617113752/http://www.arbeiter-zeitung.at/cgi-bin/az/flash.pl?seite=19500312_A07;html=1|url-status=dead}}</ref> William Cook, after his 2006 visit to Vienna's [[Third Man Museum]], 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."<ref name=Cook/>

 

 

Upon its release in Britain and America, the film received overwhelmingly positive reviews.<ref>"The Third Man was a huge box-office success both in Europe and America, a success that reflected great critical acclamation&nbsp;... The legendary French critic [[André Bazin]] was echoing widespread views when, in October 1949, he wrote of The Third Man's director: "Carol Reed&nbsp;... definitively proves himself to be the most brilliant of English directors and one of the foremost in the world." The positive critical reaction extended to all parts of the press, from popular daily newspapers to specialist film magazines, from niche consumer publications to the broadsheet establishment papers&nbsp;... Dissenting voices were very rare, but there were some. {{cite web |first=Rob |last=White |title=The Third Man – Critical Reception |publisher=Screenonline.org |url=http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/591618/index.html}}</ref> [[Time (magazine)|''Time'']] wrote that the film was "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."<ref name="time19500206">{{cite magazine | url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,811872,00.html | title=The New Pictures | magazine=Time | date=1950-02-06 | access-date=12 February 2015 | url-status=dead | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100523042718/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,811872,00.html | archive-date=2010-05-23}}</ref> ''[[The New York Times]]'' movie critic [[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."<ref>{{cite news|title=The Screen in Review: ''The Third Man'', Carol Reed's Mystery-Thriller-Romance, Opens Run of Victoria|url= https://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A02E4DB1E39E43BBC4B53DFB466838B649EDE|last=Crowther|first=Bosley|author-link= Bosley Crowther|series=NYT Critics Pick|work=The New York Times|date=3 February 1950|access-date=15 August 2009}}</ref> A rare negative review came from the British communist newspaper ''Daily Worker'' (later the ''[[Morning Star (British newspaper)|Morning Star]]''), which complained that "no effort is spared to make the Soviet authorities as sinister and unsympathetic as possible."<ref>Quoted in the British Film Institute's [[Screenonline]] {{cite web |publisher=Screenonline.org |title=The Third Man – Critical Reception |first=Bob |last=White |url=http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/591618/index.html}}</ref>

Cotten reprised his role as Holly Martins in a one-hour ''[[The United States Steel Hour|Theatre Guild on the Air]]'' radio adaptation on 7 January 1951. It was also adapted as a one-hour radio play on two broadcasts of ''[[Lux Radio Theatre]]'': on 9 April 1951 with Joseph Cotten again reprising his role and on 8 February 1954 with [[Ray Milland]] as Martins.

 

 

 

 

==Spin-offs==

The British radio 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 the film, and Welles reprises his role as a somewhat less nefarious adventurer anti-hero than the sociopathic opportunist depicted in the film's incarnation. 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 StudioCanal releases of ''The Third Man''. 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]]''.

 

 

 

==See also==

[[Category:1940s English-language films]]

[[Category:1940s British films]]