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The
third man
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Movie
| Book
| Author
| Director
& cast
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Book: The Third Man (1948)
Movie: The Third Man (1949)
Premise
movie:
"The Third Man was directed by Carol Reed and written
by Graham Greene, The Third Man is a classic film noir, enhanced
even more so by the quirky zither music of Anton Karas and fine
cinematography of Vienna's bombed out buildings and underground
sewers. Set in post-war Austria, a country politically divided into
different sectors controlled by the U.S., England, France and
Russia. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), an American author, arrives
in Vienna where he has been promised work by his old school friend
Harry Lime (Orson Welles). Upon his arrival, Martins discovers that
Lime has been killed in a suspicious car accident, and that his
funeral is taking place immediately. At the graveside, Martins meets
outwardly affable Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and actress Anna
Schmidt (Alida Valli), who is weeping copiously. When Calloway tells
Martins that the late Harry Lime was nothing more or less than a
thief and a murderer, the loyal Martins is at first outraged.
Gradually, he not only discovers that Calloway was right, but also
that the man lying in the coffin in the film's early scenes was not
Harry Lime at all - and that Lime is still very much alive (he was
the mysterious "third man" at the scene of the fatal accident).
Calloway hopes to use either Anna or Hollings to flush out Lime.
Unswerving in her loyalty, Anna refuses. Martins does likewise,
until Calloway shows the novelist the tragic results of Lime's black-market in diluted penicillin. Arranging a rendezvous with Lime at
the huge Ferris wheel in the centre of Vienna, Hollings listens in
barely concealed disgust as Lime casually dismisses his heinous
crimes. Feeling particularly brazen, Lime offers not to kill
Hollings if the latter will go into business with him. Thus the
stage is set for the famous climactic confrontation in the sewers of
Vienna - and the even more famous final shot of The Third Man, in
which Martins pays emotionally for doing the right thing. The film
is currently available in both an American and British release
version; the American version with an introduction by Joseph
Cotten, the British version is narrated by Carol Reed. Nominated for several
Academy Awards, The Third Man won a "Best Cinematography" prize for
Robert Krasker."
from:
http://www.britmovie.co.uk/directors/c_reed/filmography
/003.html
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Premise
book:
"This short novel began life as film treatment, and as
Greene himself said, the film is "the finished state of the story."
The film, starring Orson Welles, is indeed a classic, but the novel
holds up nicely on its own. The story is set in Vienna, in the
immediate aftermath of World War II, when the city is still divided
into four zones of occupation by France, Britain, the USA, and the
USSR. Civil order has just barely been imposed, and the
uncertainties of jurisdiction and territory between the Allied
powers nicely match the extreme uncertainties of the tale. Strictly
speaking, the book is not really about espionage, but the dark tone,
secretive characters, and multinational interests make it at least
an honorary member of the genre. Greene uses an odd narrative strategy here: the story is told in the
first person by a British military police officer who hardly figures
in the story except as an observer. The real character is Rollo
Martins, who arrives from England in search of his good friend (and
occasional business partner) Harry Lime. Very unfortunately, Lime
has just been killed in a hit-and-run automobile accident, and
accounts vary about exactly what happened and (especially) how many
people were on the scene immediately afterwards. Martins becomes
curious to learn more, both about the death and about what Lime had
been up to. Pushing for more information, he encounters silence,
intimidation, and violent opposition. His questions widen: was it
murder or accident? did Lime deserve to die? did Lime in fact die at
all? "
from:
http://www.mysteryguide.com/bkGreeneMan.html
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Author:
" Graham Greene was born in
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, as the son of Charles Greene and Marion Raymond
Greene, a first cousin of the author Robert Louis Stevenson. Greene's father had a poor
academic record but became the headmaster of Berkhamsted School,
following Dr. Thomas Fry. Charles Greene had a brilliant intellect.
Originally he had intended to become a barrister. However, he found
that he had liking for teaching and he decided to stay at
Berkhamsted. Often his history lessons were less lessons than
comments on the crack-up of Liberalism. His brother Graham ended his
career as Permanent Secretary at the Admiralty.
Greene was educated at Berkhamstead School and Balliol College,
Oxford. He had a natural talent for writing, and during his three
years at Balliol, he published more than sixty poems, stories,
articles and reviews, most of which appeared in the student magazine
Oxford Outlook and in the Weekly Westminster Gazette. In 1926 he
converted to Roman Catholicism, later explaining that "I hand to
find a religion... to measure my evil against." When critics started
to study the religious faith in his work, Greene complained that he
hated the term 'Catholic novelist'.
In 1926 Geene moved to London. He worked for the Times of London
(1926-30), and for the Spectator, where he was a film critic and a
literary editor until 1940. In 1927 he married Vivien Dayrell-Browning. After the collapse of their marriage, he had several
relationships, among others in the 1950s with the Swedish actress
Anita Björk, whose husband writer Stig Dagerman had committed
suicide. During the 1920s and 1930s Greene had, according to his own
private reckoning, some sort of of relationship with no less than
forty-seven prostitutes. In 1938 Greene began an affair with Dorothy
Glover, a theatre costume designer; they were closely involved with
each other until the late 1940s. She started a career as a book
illustrator under the name 'Dorothy Craigie' and wrote children's
books of her own, among them Nicky and Nigger and the Pirate (1960).
During World War II Greene worked "in a silly useless job" as he
later said, in an intelligence capacity for the Foreign Office in
London, directly under Kim Philby, a future defector to the Soviet
Union. One mission took Greene to West Africa, but he did not find
much excitement in his remote posting - "This is not a government
house, and there is no larder: there is also a plague of house-flies
which come from the African bush lavatories round the house," he
wrote to London. Greene returned to England in 1942. After the war
he travelled widely as a free-lance journalist, and lived long
periods in Nice, on the French Riviera. With his anti-American
comments, Greene gained access to such Communist leaders as Fidel
Castro and Ho Chi Minh, but the English writer Evelyn Waugh, who
knew Greene well, assured in a letter to his friend that the
author "is a secret agent on our side and all his buttering up of
the Russians is 'cover'." Greene's agent novels were partly based on his own experiences in
the British foreign office in the 1940s and his lifelong ties with
SIS. As an agent and a writer Greene is a link in the long tradition
from Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson and Daniel Defoe to the modern
day writers John Le Carré, John Dickson Carr, Somerset
Maugham, Alec Waugh and Ted Allbeury. Greene's uncle Sir William Graham Greene
helped to establish the Naval Intelligence Department, and his
oldest brother, Herbert, served as a spy for the Imperial Japanese
Navy in the 1930s. Graham's younger sister, Elisabeth, joined MI6,
and recruited his Graham into the regular ranks of the service. His
old friend, Philby, Greene met again in the late 1980s in Moscow.
Greene received numerous honours from around the world, and
published two volumes of autobiography, A SORT OF LIFE (1971), WAYS
OF ESCAPE (1980), and the story of his friendship with Panamanian
dictator General Omar Torrijos. - Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland,
on April 3, 1991. In the service the priest declared, "My faith
tells me that he is now with God, or on the way there." Two days
before his death Greene signed a note that gave his approval to
Norman Sherry to complete an authorized biography. The first part of
the book appeared in 1989. As a writer Greene was very prolific and versatile. He wrote five
dramas and screenplays for several films based on his novels. The
Third Man (1949) was developed from a single sentence: "I had paid
my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered
into the frozen February ground, so that it was incredulity that I
saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of
strangers in the Strand." To do research for the film, Greene went
to Vienna, where a reported told him about the black market trade in
watered-down penicillin. With the £9,000 he had received from
Alexander Korda, he bough a yacht and a villa in Anacapri. Later he
portryed Korda in LOSER TAKES ALL (1955) - he was Dreuther, the
business tycoon."
from:
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/greene.htm
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Director:
Carol Reed
Cast:
Joseph Cotton (Holly Martins), Orson Welles (Harry Lime),
Alida Valli (Anna Schmidt), Trevor Howard (Major Calloway), Bernard
Lee (Sergeant Paine), Wilfrid Hyde White (Crabbin), Paul Hoerbiger
(Porter), Ernst Deutch (Baron Kurtz) and others.
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