The Third Man

The character of Crabbin was originally meant to be two characters, to be played by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, who were an established comedy duet in films. The film is consistently in the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, was #18 on American Film Institute's 100 Years, 100 Laughs, and has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. As well as Welles' contributions, there were other significant changes between Greene's screenplay and the film. Audiences and critics would later agree with him after re-considering the film, and it is now considered a classic. (The impact of Lime's statement is in some ways enhanced by the fact that the cuckoo clock is in fact a German invention, and the Swiss do not even have that to their credit.). It was not one of Keaton's biggest box office successes, which disappointed him as he considered it to be the best of all his movies. Greene has confessed that this remark was not his own invention, but rather Welles' contribution to the script. The General received only mediocre reviews upon its release.

In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.". The metal of the train was salvaged for scrap during World War II. "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. The production company could not afford to remove the wreckage after the scene was filmed, so they left it there, where it became a minor tourist attraction for nearly twenty years. Back on the ground, he makes the now famous remark:. This scene was one of the single most expensive shots in motion picture history at the time, though Keaton felt it was worth it. Looking down upon the people beneath from his vantage point on top of the Riesenrad, the large Ferris wheel in the Prater amusement park, Lime compares them to ants. The climax of the film includes a spectacular moment where a bridge (sabotaged by Keaton's character) collapses as a railroad train crosses it (compare The Bridge on the River Kwai).

In 1999 it came first in a BFI poll of British films, while in 2004 the magazine Total Film named it the third greatest British film. Keaton performs lots of dangerous physical stunts on and around the moving train, which include jumping from the engine to a boxcar, sitting on the cow-catcher, and running along the roof. The film was also voted the best British film of all time by the British Film Institute, and in public opinion polls is consistently placed in the top ten British films of all time. The event was also the subject of the film The Great Locomotive Chase. The film won the 1949 Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the Cannes Film Festival, a British Academy Award for Best Film, and an Academy Award for Best Black and White Cinematography in 1950. Although played for laughs in the film, many of the events actually occurred in a chase through Georgia and Tennessee between trains pulled by locomotives named General and Texas (see Great Locomotive Chase for more details on the actual event). A single, The Third Man Theme, released in 1950 (Decca in UK, London Records in USA) became a bestseller, and later an LP was released. The plot turns on a chase between two locomotives and a railroad worker, played by Keaton, initially on a handcart and later on another locomotive.

The distinctive musical score was composed and played on the zither by Anton Karas (1906 – 1985). It was adapted by Al Boasberg, Bruckman, Keaton, Charles Henry Smith (uncredited) and Paul Girard Smith (uncredited) from the memoir The Great Locomotive Chase by William Pittenger. The atmospheric use of black and white cinematography (by Robert Krasker), harsh lighting, distorted camera angles, combined with the unique musical theme and excellent performances from the cast, all serve to convey the atmosphere of post-War Vienna, creating the tension inherent in the story, and making this one of Reed's best-loved films. The General is a 1927 silent comedy about a bumbling Confederate engineer (train driver) who pursues Union spies who steal his beloved locomotive, The General, which incidentally also carries his estranged girlfriend as well. Buster Keaton starred in the film and co-directed it with Clyde Bruckman. 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).". I don't think he said a word to her: it was like the end of a story.

He caught her up and they walked side by side. 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. Perhaps the most fundamental difference is the end of the novella, in which it is implied that Anna and Rollo/Holly are about to begin a new life together, in stark contrast to the unmistakable snub that makes the end of the movie so memorable. Popescu's character is an American called Cooler.

Martins' first name is Rollo rather than Holly. Other differences include the nationality of both Martins and Lime (they are English in the book. A small portion of his narration (given to Martins in the American release, and to an unidentified, unseen and never-returned-to character voiced by Carol Reed in the British release) is retained in a modified form at the very beginning of the movie, the part in which a voiceover declaims: "I never knew the old Vienna...". The narrator in the novella is Calloway, which gives the book a slightly different emphasis from the screenplay.

Before writing the screenplay, Greene worked out the atmosphere, characterisation and mood of the story by writing a novella. 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 Penguin Books later published it. Most noticeably, the opening monologue, spoken by Reed himself in the original, was re-recorded by Joseph Cotten. This probably served to reduce the strongly anti-American tone of the original. The US version of The Third Man emphasises Martins' point of view much more strongly than the cut that was shown in British cinemas.

It is a common misconception that Harry Lime himself is the "third man". It is this "third man", Joseph Harbin, that the title of the film (which is essentially an elaborate MacGuffin) refers to. Martins' investigation leads to another eyewitness not associated with Lime who claims that there was a third man who helped carry Lime's body. All eyewitnesses to the accident happen to be friends or associates of Lime.

On several accounts, two of Lime's friends carried Lime's body off the street after the accident. Martins is told that Lime was struck by a truck while crossing a street. He finds that there was more to Lime than he knew and that he was accused of being a black-market racketeer, trafficking in poor quality penicillin. At the beginning of the film, Martins discovers that his old friend Harry Lime, whom he had not seen in several years, has died under mysterious circumstances just prior to Martins' arrival in Vienna.

The story is set in a bomb-damaged Vienna just after the Second World War and is told from the point of view of a mildly successful pulp author, Holly Martins, who is searching for his friend Harry Lime. The screenplay was written by novelist Graham Greene. The Third Man (1949) is a film noir directed by Carol Reed. Although it can be said that because Joseph Harbin was actually the one that was hit by the truck, and Harry Lime apparently helped carry Harbin away, perhaps it is not entirely unreasonable to refer to Harry as the "Third Man.".

This is due in part to the greater fame of Welles, and also to the fact that the film's photography is heavily influenced by Welles's style. Many people erroneously believe that Orson Welles directed the film himself. A television series was later created out of the film, with Michael Rennie starring as Harry Lime. A radio drama series called The Third Man and centring on the adventures of Harry Lime (voiced by Welles) prior to his "death in Vienna" ran for a number of seasons.

Siegfried Breuer as Popescu. Ernst Deutsch as Kurtz. Winkel. Erich Ponto as Dr.

Paine. Bernard Lee as Sgt. Wilfrid Hyde-White as Crabbin. Trevor Howard as Major Calloway.

Alida Valli as Anna Schmidt. Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins. Orson Welles as Harry Lime.