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The Third Man

The Third Man is a 1949 film noir directed by Carol Reed, written by Graham Greene, and starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard, set in post-war Vienna. The film centres on an American, Holly Martins (Cotten), who arrives in the city to accept a job with his friend Harry Lime (Welles), only to learn that Lime has died. Martins decides to stay in Vienna and investigate his death.

This article is about the film. For other uses, see The Third Man (disambiguation).

The Third Man

  • 1 September 1949 (1949-09-01) (United Kingdom)[3]
  • 2 February 1950 (1950-02-02) (United States)[2]

104 minutes

  • English
  • German

£277,549 (UK) (equivalent to £12,386,000 in 2023)[5]

The atmospheric use of black-and-white expressionist cinematography by Robert Krasker, harsh lighting, and subtle "Dutch angle" camera technique are major features of The Third Man, combined with the film's zither music by Anton Karas, bombed-out 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 as preparation for the screenplay. Karas's 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 the greatest films of all time, celebrated for its acting, musical score, and atmospheric cinematography.[6]


In 1999, the British Film Institute voted The Third Man the greatest British film of all time. In 2011, a poll for Time Out ranked it the second-best British film ever.[7]

Plot[edit]

Holly Martins, an American author of western fiction, arrives in post-World War II Vienna seeking his childhood friend, Harry Lime, who has offered him a job. However, Martins is told that Lime has been killed by a car while crossing the street. At Lime's funeral, Martins meets two British Royal Military Police: Sergeant Paine, a fan of Martins' books, and Major Calloway. Afterward, Martins is asked by Mr. Crabbin 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.


As Martins and Anna query Lime's death, they realise that accounts differ as to whether Lime was able to speak before his death, and whether two men carried away the body, or three. The porter at Lime's apartment tells them that he saw a third man helping carry away the body. Later, the porter offers to give Martins more information, but he is murdered before Martins can talk to him again. Martins confronts Major Calloway and demands that Lime's death be investigated. Calloway reveals that Lime was stealing penicillin from military hospitals with the help of an orderly, diluting it, then selling it on the black market, injuring or killing countless adults and children. Martins, convinced by hard evidence, agrees to drop his investigation and leave. That evening, Martins visits Anna, with whom he is falling in love. Outside, a man crosses the street towards her front door, but moves away after seeing Martins at the window. After leaving, Martins walks the streets, until he notices Anna's cat and realises someone is watching from a darkened doorway. In a momentary flash of light, Martin sees that the man is Harry Lime. Martins calls out but Lime flees and vanishes. Martins summons Calloway, who realises that Lime has escaped through the city's extensive sewers to the Russian sector. The British police exhume Lime's coffin and discover that the body is that of the missing orderly who stole the penicillin for Lime. Anna, who is Czech, is to be sent to the Soviet sector, and is questioned again by Calloway.


Martins goes to Kurtz and asks to see Lime. He meets Lime and they speak as they ride the Wiener Riesenrad. Lime obliquely threatens Martins before leaving quickly. Calloway then asks Martins to help arrest Lime. Martins agrees to help on one condition, demanding Anna's safe conduct out of Vienna. Anna is about to leave on the train when she spots Martins, who has come to observe her departure. She persuades him to reveal the plan but wants no part of it. Exasperated, Martins decides to leave Vienna, but on the way to the airport, Calloway stops at a hospital to show Martins children crippled or dying of meningitis who were treated with Lime's diluted penicillin. Martins again agrees to help the police.


Lime arrives at a small café to meet Martins, but Anna is able to warn Lime that the police are closing in. He tries again to escape using the sewer tunnels, but the police are prepared and pursue him below ground. Lime shoots and kills Sgt. Paine, but Calloway shoots and badly wounds Lime. Injured, Lime drags himself up a cast-iron stairway to a street grating, but he cannot lift it. Martins finds Lime at the grating and they exchange a look. They hear Calloway shouting that Martins must take no chances and that if he finds Lime he must shoot him on sight. Trapped, and still looking at his old friend, Lime nods his head slightly and Martins shoots and kills him, using Paine's revolver.


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

Production[edit]

Development[edit]

Before writing the screenplay, Graham Greene worked out the atmosphere, characterisation, and mood of the story by writing a novella as a treatment for the screenplay. He 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 central European correspondent for The Times of London. Smolka gave Greene stories about the black market in Vienna.[9]


During the shooting of the film, the final scene was the subject of a dispute between David O. Selznick, who wanted the happy ending of the novella, and Reed, who stubbornly refused to end the film on what he felt was an artificially happy note.[10] 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."[11]


Selznick's contribution, according to himself, was mainly to have provided his actors Cotten and Welles and to have produced the shortened US version.[12]


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 it a "popular misconception",[13] although Rosenbaum did note that the film "began to echo the Wellesian theme of betrayed male friendship and certain related ideas from Citizen Kane."[14] 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."[14] 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—but that it was a "delicate matter" he did not want to discuss because he wasn't the film's producer.[15] However, in a 1967 interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Welles said that his involvement was minimal: "It was Carol's picture".[16] Welles did contribute some of the film's best-known dialogue. Bogdanovich also stated in the introduction to the DVD:

Copyright status[edit]

In the United Kingdom, films of this vintage are copyright protected as dramatic works until 70 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.


The 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[58] restored the film's U.S. 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,[59] and in September 2010, Lionsgate reissued the film on Blu-ray.[55]


On 18 January 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Golan v. Holder that the copyright clause of the United States Constitution does not prevent the U.S. 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 copyrighted in the United States.[60] Under current U.S. copyright law, The Third Man will remain copyrighted until 1 January 2045.[58]

Adaptations[edit]

Cotten reprised his role as Holly Martins in the one-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 reprising his role and on 8 February 1954 with Ray Milland as Martins.


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 before his "death in Vienna", 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 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 included on the Criterion Collection DVD The Complete Mr. Arkadin.


Harry Lime appeared in two stories in the fourth issue of Super Detective Library.


A television spin-off starring Michael Rennie as Harry Lime ran for five seasons from 1959 to 1965. Seventy-seven episodes were filmed; 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 installment "The Angry Young Man", which Hiller directed.

Third Man Museum

BFI Top 100 British films

alleyway in Vienna

Schönlaterngasse

at IMDb

The Third Man

at the BFI's Screenonline

The Third Man

at the TCM Movie Database

The Third Man

at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films

The Third Man

at Rotten Tomatoes

The Third Man

at Metacritic

The Third Man

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

on Theater Guild on the Air: 7 January 1951

The Third Man

on Lux Radio Theater: 9 April 1951

The Third Man

an essay by Michael Wilmington at the Criterion Collection

The Third Man