Original subtitles

I never knew the old Vienna before the war,

with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm.

Constantinople suited me better.

I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market.

We'd run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay.

I don't know what type of film it is, really.

Is it a film noir?

Is it a thriller?

Is it a drama? Is it a love story?

It's everything, really.

It's just...perfect...

..for the time it was in.

Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities.

Bombed about a bit. Oh, I was going to tell you.

Wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins,

an American, came all the way here to visit a friend of his.

The name was Lime. Harry Lime. Now Martins was broken.

Lime had offered him some sort, I don't know, some sort of a job.

Anyway, there he was, poor chap. Happy as a lark, and without a cent.

(ZITHER MUSIC PLAYS)

The Third Man, one of the greatest film noir's ever made.

Directed by Carol Reed, starring the inimitable Orson Welles,

and set in a haunting, war-torn Vienna of 1949.

There are few films that can match the atmosphere and mystery.

Produced by Alexander Korda, it is a film of many gifts.

Novelist-turned-screenwriter Graeme Greene's furtive plot,

as strange and twisting as the ruined Vienna streets,

the timeless style of Welles' villain Harry Lime,

and the poignancy of Joseph Cotten's fumbling hero Holly Martins,

the shimmering notes of Anton Karas' zither on the score,

and the expressionist magnificence of Robert Krasker's cinematography

transforming a city into a realm of dancing shadows.

(ZITHER PLAYS)

Vienna is today a city that lies dreaming of its imperial past,

its houses and old churches stand unchanged

by the passage of centuries.

(WALTZ PLAYS)

This is Vienna, once the jewel of an empire,

home to composers, philosophers and artists.

A city for coffee and chocolate cake.

(BELLS RING)

This was the great metropolis that made a Faustian pact with Hitler,

a city left defeated at the end of the war,

and occupied by the four victorious powers -

France, Britain, America and Russia.

It was a place enshrouded in contradiction and conflict.

In 1949, it was bombed about a bit.

Rubble and ruins scarred the classical architecture.

People didn't live. They survived.

It was here that Alexander Korda would decide to set his ambitious

and highly international film project The Third Man.

It was either going to be Vienna or Rome, in fact,

because he really wanted to address

the sort of post-war situation in Europe.

He could see it, first of all, as a thriller,

but it would give him a broader canvas, something that

might look deeper into the effects of the war

on societies, on European society.

Graham Greene came up with a basic idea

that he'd actually written on an envelope 20 years earlier,

which was a simple paragraph about a man

who'd just been to the funeral of his best friend,

is walking along the strand, and he sees him alive,

walking down the street, completely unacknowledged.

The Third Man is one of my favourite films of all time.

Not for the...necessarily for the conventional reasons.

What I love about this film is that it was created

out of convenience, and there were reasons

for doing this film which were not to create a classic.

They were to save money or they were to capitalise

on foreign exchange problems, and all of these little shortcuts

and these little routines that they went through

in order to blag this or to organise that,

and out of this chaos and disorder,

they built one of the greatest films of all time.

Angela Allen worked as a script supervisor on the Third Man,

and got to witness the Vienna of 1949

captured so vividly on the screen.

What would you say was Alexander Korda's motivation

for setting a film in Vienna?

I think to use up the money that was in Vienna

from the previous films he'd made there before the war.

Because of course, before the war, he'd made films in Vienna

and he'd come to England as a Hungarian emigre, hadn't he?

Yes, he had to leave Hungary, and...

..he'd been through various countries

and I think had made various films in Austria.

Do you think that gave him, as a producer,

a sort of sense of international cinema

rather than just British cinema?

Oh, I think so, very definitely.

And I think he had a tremendous entrepreneurial gift

and he'd learned how to use it over the years.

My fellow film reviewer and film historian Derek Malcolm

knew all three of the key figures behind The Third Man's creation -

Carol Reed, Graham Greene and Alexander Korda.

How would you describe Sir Alexander Korda's style of filmmaking?

Well, he wanted to be big and better,

or at least as good as Hollywood.

And that was he felt...that the British cinema was introspective

and...and wasn't capable of doing anything really big.

And he wanted to be Korda from England AND Hollywood.

And he got his way in a way.

He was an amazing man.

And he didn't interfere with directors too much either.

Once he got them on trust, he kept his trust, you know.

And I thought that was pretty good.

Korda was a remarkable man.Yeah.

There's no doubt about it. And when he died,

a lot left the British film industry, I think.

And what was it like in Vienna in 1948 when you were there?

What was it like? We see the film's version of Vienna,

but what was it like for you being there?

Well, it was a very restricted country for anybody

unless you were in the military.

There was only one hotel we could stay in as a film unit,

but also other people, because everything else

was in a different zone, and you had to be in the military.

The rubble was up to the second floor on the Karntner Strasse,

the main sort of street or whatever you like to call it.

The Opera House had been bombed. It was a bombed-out city.

So what we see on screen is realistic.

Oh, completely. There was no set dressing of the streets of Vienna.

Korda had struck gold with his partnership

of director Carol Reed and the novelist Graham Greene.

Greene had positively reviewed Reed's early film work,

and Korda was able to bring their talents together,

first in London before venturing out to Vienna.

So Graham Greene started out as a film critic

in the 1930s, and became well-known

for some very strongly worded and opinionated pieces

about American film in particular.

By the 1940s, he was also a novelist,

and his novel The Fallen Idol was adapted in part by himself

for the screen, along with producer Alexander Korda

and by director Carol Reed,

which of course, would become the great trio

who would go on to make The Third Man.

What was Graham Greene's involvement in the film industry in the 1940s?

Well, I think he got into it gradually,

like a lot of people, you know.

He had to learn his craft.

It was very different to writing books.

And he... I think he gradually realised

that he wanted to really have his own script for a film,

and eventually he did.

And I don't think he regretted it for a moment,

but I think it was a learning progress, don't you?

Yes. Yes.Like everybody in the film business,

you know, you got in small, gradually developed

and then you got trusted by people just like Carol Reed.

Yes.

All that was left was to cast the lead roles.

Joseph Cotten signed on for the protagonist Holly Martins.

But there would be an anxious wait for the elusive Orson Welles,

who was playing Harry Lime.

Passport, please. What's the purpose of your visit here?

A friend of mine offered me a job here.Where are you staying?

With him. 15 Stiffgasse.His name?

Lime. Harry Lime.

OK.Thought he'd be here to meet me.

(ZITHER MUSIC)

Can you tell me...

who's...

Fella called Lime.

Now, I think before he even got to set,

Orson Welles was already as elusive as Harry Lime, wasn't he?

He was late, and he was either delaying his arrival...

What was it like for you on set, waiting for Orson?

Well, we all knew,

you know, we had a schedule and he was supposed to be

in certain shots, and then they'd phone him.

I think he was in Paris, and then they sent a man to get him in Paris.

So of course he flew to Rome.

Then he flew to Rome, and he's gone back to somewhere else.

And eventually he turned up, and his very first shot in the film

was when he's walking through the Prater

on his way to the wheel scene.

So what did Carol Reed do to, you know,

facilitate having Harry Lime in his film

when there was no Orson Welles there?

Well, at one point...of course, it was night shooting,

and he was supposed to be there.

And he turned to his wonderful assistant

and protege Guy Hamilton and said,

"You're going to have to run and double for him,

but you're too slim, so put a coat hanger in the overcoat and a hat."

And so Guy had to run, was the shadow sort of running up the road.

And... So that when Orson did appear,

he really had no alternative but to wear the hat

and the coat because it had been, you know, established.

I gather Orson Welles had been incredibly elusive

and, you know, across Europe,

and they finally got him to set. Yes.

I mean, when he when he was in Rome, "No, he's just left for Florence."

And then he was in Florence. "No, he's just left for Nice."

They finally caught him up in Nice.

And he said he'd come and do the film.

But he made a big mistake, because he actually took his salary,

which he wanted badly to make Othello.

That was why he did the film.

He wanted to make Othello. He hadn't got enough money.

He made a big mistake, took a salary instead of a piece of the film.

If it has a piece of the film, he could have made Othello twice over.

The key figure in securing Orson Welles for the role

of Harry Lime had been the film's co-producer David O. Selznick.

So David O. Selznick came in on the picture

sort of to meet Korda halfway,

became American-British co-production of sorts.

And Selznick did lend some major sort of firepower to the cast.

He wanted the film to appeal to American audiences,

and he had both Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli under contract.

So he insisted upon those two in the main parts.

He was also able to help wrangle Orson Welles,

who, of course, became iconic in the part of Harry Lime.

So part of that was simply

commercial decision on Selznick's part.

But Selznick also had his difficulties and his downsides.

He was a notorious micro-manager.

He could be really just kind of constantly overbearing,

over the shoulders of filmmakers and creatives.

And perhaps one of the most lucky things about the Third Man

was that Carol Reed and their creative team

were all the way in Vienna, very far from Hollywood.

And so they got over 40 pages of memos from Selznick

that they just sort of binned without even looking at,

because, you know, he wanted to change the name

to A Night In Vienna, and all sorts of kind of unnecessary changes

that were thankfully duly ignored.

What is so ingenious about Greene's script

is that we feel we know Harry Lime before we ever set eyes on him.

Nearly every scene revolves around the shape-shifting villain,

lover, friend, racketeer,

elusive spirit of the Viennese night.

And he's played by Orson Welles,

to say the least, who needed a dramatic entrance.

The arrival of Welles actually changed everything

because when he did appear as Harry Lime,

it was the film's best revelation.

You've been working up to the idea that this was a man

who was a seedy monster, and the first time

in one of the great entrances of any film,

you see Harry Lime caught in the light from a window

in a darkened doorway...

Joseph Cotten has been rushing around Vienna

trying to understand what happened to his friend Harry,

the great sort of nervous energy that he brings to this search.

He's in love with Anna, Harry Lime's girlfriend

who wants nothing to do with him.

There's a particular point in the film where he finally accepts

it's all over, he's going to go back to America.

Everything is resolved.

Now, we've been set up at this point with Anna's apartment having a cat,

and she's told Joseph Cotten

the only person this cat likes is Harry Lime.

Then Cotten walks into the street and he sees a figure in the shadows.

We can't see this figure at all, we can just see his feet,

and we can see the cat is licking the boots of this man.

Now, that's the first clue we get as to who we're going to be seeing.

This is a way to indicate to us

who's about to emerge from the shadows.

(ZITHER MUSIC)

(MIAOWING)

What kind of a spy do you think you are?

What are you tailing me for?

(FOOTSTEPS)

Cat got your tongue?

Come on out.

Come out, come out, whoever you are.

Of course the other legendary scene in The Third Man

is the entrance of Harry Lime,

which I think is probably the greatest entrance in film history.

Oh, I agree with you entirely.

Nobody could have a better entrance.

Well, it was shot in the doorway in Vienna,

and I thought it was incredibly well lit.

Well, you couldn't get a much better cameraman than Robert Krasker.

But there were sort of, like all things in films,

there were sort of bits and pieces done at the studio

and bits done on location.

How did it break down? If we were looking to analyse it, what's where?

Well, the cat, although there was a cat,

you know, in, say, the long shot,

but of course they used the close up for his entrance,

and then to get the cat to look up to Orson Welles,

we did that in the studio.

We had many cats, and we tried them out.

No, maybe he'd like fish paste. No, he doesn't like fish paste.

What can we try him with, and...

Everything, and when our second unit had nothing else to do,

it was, get the cat out, get a cat.

It had to be a matching...you know, colourwise, but...

then the cat, you know, would be tried out as to

whether he would do anything and react the way Carol wanted him to.

So we shot the cat quite a few times.

So the cat was even more difficult than Orson Welles.

Oh, definitely.

Step out in the light. Let's have a look at you.

Who's your boss?

(WOMAN'S VOICE)

(WOMAN SPEAKS ANGRILY IN GERMAN)

Reed served up possibly the greatest entrance in film history.

A mix of studio and location shooting,

it is a sublime moment - Harry, hiding in a doorway,

betrayed by the cat who adores him,

a shard of light from a window falls across his face,

and the revelation of that Mona Lisa smile

as if it's all a game.

Not once do we hear that magnificent voice.

Harry.

(WOMAN CONTINUES TO SPEAK GERMAN)

Joseph Cotten runs towards him, nearly gets run over by a car,

and he's gone, and it's just this...

Orson Welles does almost nothing.

But his smile, his stillness, and the power

that he brings to that shot is phenomenal.

It's one of the greatest entrances in movie history.

I don't know what Carol Reed's sort of

descriptions were of the scenes,

but there's such wonderful sense of enigma in that moment,

because you have Orson Welles, who has the greatest voice in film,

and he doesn't have him say a line, he just has him smile.

Oh, well, yes, and then,

as they all say, less is more.

And it didn't need any words.

It was just that wonderful smile.

And then off he goes.

Joseph Cotten, he has no sense of the devastation.

He has no sense of the kind of reality of life after war.

He is still living in a kind of

Hollywood dream of the perfect world.

He is not disillusioned.

Everyone else around him have had all their illusions shattered.

And it's the journey that he takes

from being this man who is just bewildered...

I mean, he's absolutely bewildered by what's going on,

he's bewildered by the fact that his friend's dead.

Apparently. He's bewildered by the fact that he's not dead then,

apparently, he's bewildered by the fact he doesn't understand anybody

because when they speak in German -

and this was Carol Reed's decision -

there was no subtitles.

So if they speak in German, we the audience,

unless we speak German, are in exactly the same position as Holly.

We don't know what they're talking about.

So this gives you a great sense of alienation.

And he does. He's a stranger in a strange land.

And yet he persists. Yet he falls in love.

Yet he does all the things that his heart tells him to

until finally he is confronted with the very, very horrific reality

of what his friend has done, and that is his loss of innocence.

That's when he actually becomes European.

Hello, old friend! How are you? Hello, Harry.

Well, well, I seem to giving you quite some busy time.

Yes.I want to talk to you.Talk to me?

Of course. Come on.

Kids used to ride this a lot in the old days. They have no money now.

(WOMAN ASKS QUESTION IN GERMAN, HARRY REPLIES)

Listen, Harry, I didn't believe it.

Good to see you, Holly.Was at your funeral.

It was pretty smart, wasn't it?

The great wheel of the Prater had somehow survived the war

and it stood amidst the ruins, a symbol of a city's delusion.

It is the perfect location of a meeting of old friends

and now foes, Holly Martins and Harry Lime.

As the wheel turns, we circle through the charms

and manipulation of Harry's desperation.

Would he really be willing to kill his friend?

It is here that Welles' voice is the amoral philosophy of his character.

Holly is a naive American who is beset

by the horrors of the aftermath of war,

and also the idea that his best friend is a racketeer,

and yet he finds the gumption to actually challenge him,

finally, in the great Ferris wheel.

And that is one of the key scenes,

because you realise that underneath that sort of innocent figure,

there is a good stout heart, that he is prepared

to actually challenge his friend.

And they have the wonderful sort of debate about what human beings are.

And then you see Harry Lime in his true colours when he looks down,

and he offers him a deal, almost like the devil,

saying, "These aren't human beings. These are just people.

If I offered you $20,000 and one of those dots disappeared,

would you take it?

If I offered you $40,000 would you take it?"

This is a very, very tense moment because

it's done not with any kind of huge drama.

It's done with quite quiet dialogue,

and you can tell on the faces of the two men

that they're playing this sort of very, very dangerous game.

Wonderful, wonderful moment, one of the key moments

in not just this film, but any film, actually.

Joseph Cotten is the perfect Holly Martins,

because as an actor in America, he's...

..he had built a reputation playing those sorts of characters,

those sort of figures of American manhood.

They were usually heroic, but they had a slight hint of darkness.

He'd played with Orson Welles before in Citizen Kane,

the man who'd been slightly enraptured by Citizen Kane,

but then sort of had the scales fall from his eyes.

And so he brings to the role of the author of Pulp westerns

a certain Western sensibility, in a way.

As an actor, he's got a slight, slight element

of the cowboy to him, and so he's out of his depth completely.

And... Again, this is an actor who is

as much the part himself as you could wish.

You know, he brings all of those qualities -

the naive American, the man who's used to playing the good guy,

who expects everything to fall into place,

and who's suddenly finding that the answers

aren't coming, the results aren't coming.

There's a great trope in Westerns,

which is when your buddy betrays you, what do you do?

And in the final shootout, you'll always shoot him dead.

But the point about The Third Man is what will Holly do?

And in the end, he can't quite shoot his buddy dead as a Western can.

And we see him falling apart.

We see him losing his grip on the true stories

that he's expected to tell, that he's written,

and that he's performed as an actor.

Holly, I'd like to cut you in, old man.

There's nobody left in Vienna I can really trust

and we've always done everything together.

When you make up your mind, send me a message.

I'll meet you any place, any time.

And when we do meet, old man, it's you I want to see, not the police.

So another...I suppose story that, you know,

comes from the making of The Third Man

is how much Orson Welles did or didn't contribute to the script.

In particular, the scene on the Great Wheel in the Prater.

He gave Carol quite a hard time on that scene, which, of course,

was his biggest scene in the film.

But no, he did not write the script for it.

It was the Graham Greene script,

and I think one has decided to give him the credit

for the cuckoo clock line.

Don't be so gloomy. After all, it's not that awful.

Remember what the fella said - in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias

they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed,

but they produced Michelangelo,

Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

In Switzerland they had brotherly love,

they had 500 years of democracy and peace.

And what did that produce?

The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.

(ZITHER PLAYS)

The rumours that he messed with the script are not true,

except for his famous speech about the Swiss

and making only the cuckoo clock.

The Swiss objected because actually they never made a cuckoo clock

in their lives in Switzerland.

It's all done in Bavaria, apparently.

But anyway, that was a wonderful speech.

Yes.Everybody remembers. And that was Orson Welles.

There's no doubt about that. As Carol Reed has said.

But otherwise, he didn't deflect from the script at all,

and nor did he interfere with the direction at all.

He trusted Reed, and Reed trusted him in the end.

Yeah.

In the last war, a general would hang

his opponent's picture on the wall.

He got to know him that way. I'm beginning to know Lime.

I think this would have worked with your help.

What price would you pay?

Name it.

And of course the other cast was Trevor Howard. And he's always good.

He keeps on recurring in Carol Reed's films.

Always good. He was excellent in this, as was Bernard Lee.

They were the British officer and the sergeant

who tried to persuade Holly to go away

because there was something evil happening.

They are almost kind of the moral voice in the film, aren't they?

Yes, they are - they're the moral voice of the film.

I don't think it's a morality tale.

Well, perhaps it is. Do you think it is?

I think it's an exploration of morality.

Maybe the lack of morality in the post-war Europe.Yes.

Because Europe in those days was not only devastated, but also

a breeding ground for criminality,

and all sorts of things were happening.

It was a difficult time for Europe, and I think

he caught that remarkably well.

(ZITHER MUSIC PLAYS)

Viennese families dream only of the city's imperial past

when they relax in the outdoor wine taverns.

One of director Carol Reed's boldest decisions

which helped capture the feeling of post-war Vienna

was his use of a local musician for the film's score,

Anton Karas.

So the apocryphal story goes that Anton Karas was playing

in a traditional wine bar in Vienna, and Carol Reed came in

and heard him and knew that that instrument,

the zither, and Anton Karas were perfect for The Third Man

and apparently recorded him in a hotel room.

And of course, it plays that theme, that music plays

throughout almost the entirety of the film.

And the Harry Lime theme would end up being a huge hit

and sell half a million copies in 1949.

And of course, there's the music.

Anton Karas' glorious zither.

And everyone claims to have been responsible for finding him.

I know. Trevor Howard insists he found him in a cafe.

Carol Reed - "No, I found him."

But whatever they did, they were lucky, weren't they?They were.

And they went completely against the style of music of the time.

Absolutely. It was a real original touch because nobody else

had thought to do that sort of thing.

They hadn't even heard of the zither at the time.

But it became a sort of a top ten tune, didn't it?

Yeah.

And the funny thing was that Carol Reed said

they couldn't get quite the timbre right.

And he put him under his kitchen table, and it became better.

I don't know... The wood was somehow...

I have no idea about it.

But anyway, he said that it was so good under the kitchen table

that he took the kitchen table onto the set

and he put him - Anton Karas - underneath.

And that's how they did the score.

I mean, it sounds like a complete white lie,

but Carol swears that's what happened.

And what do you know of the discovery

of Anton Karas and that zither music?

Carol Reed and Guy Hamilton had been out

having a drink or...after...

obviously after shooting in, I think, Grinzing.

And then Carol said, "Oh, you know, that was interesting."

And Guy then went back and found the musician

who'd been playing that night, who was Anton Karas,

and brought him to the hotel where he played the zither for Carol.

And Carol decided he was going to use zither music in the film.

Even Korda, I think, was against it

because he had Muir Mathieson lined up.

And I think later Selznick,

who really didn't have any input into things, was kind of furious.

But Carol really stuck to his guns.

And what I think was amusing was that Carol

didn't speak a word of German,

and Anton didn't speak a word of English,

but they seemed to get on very well.

And I think he stayed in Carol's house

when he was composing, or learning how to score a film.

After all, he'd never done anything but play in a bar.

(ZITHER MUSIC PLAYS)

(SPEAKS GERMAN)

Nein, danke. Nein.

Now, in historical terms, The Third Man is set at remarkable times.

Although it's a film about a black marketeer and a criminal,

it seems to hint toward the world of espionage,

scuffling through tunnels, crossing borders.

Yes.A sort of new genre was sort of being born with The Third Man.

Yes. It's difficult to say what film it is.

Is it a love story, a drama, a thriller?

It's a bit of everything, isn't it, really?

But the whole thing, I think...the triumph is the atmosphere.

Yes.And you've got to say that wonderfully shot by Robert Krasker.

Absolutely wonderful.

I'm glad he got the Oscar, because no-one deserved it more than he did.

One of the interesting things about The Third Man

is it's created by spies - by Graeme Greene and Alexander Korda,

who worked in the Second World War, and it's created

just at the beginning of the Cold War,

because as the film was being made, the Iron Curtain was going up.

There were revolutions, Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe,

and the beginning of the world of the spy was taking place.

But this film is not about that.

Though it's set in Vienna, which is at the heart of the espionage world,

Vienna and Berlin was where so many of the espionage stories were told.

It is looking back, it's looking at

what's been left behind by the Second World War.

So it's at a pivotal moment in history,

and it tells us about what's happened, where we are.

And in many ways, it lets us know why

Europe moved in the way it was about to move.

I mean, Anna, she walks towards the Russians,

and away from the Americans at the end of the film,

and it's a very significant step.

Where do you turn? And this is clearly a prophetic movie

in so many ways, a prophetic movie where Lime talks about

the corruption, and the future, but it's also about

why Europe will be uncertain about whose side it's on

for the next 40 years, because who really is going to look after

this bedraggled country, this bedraggled woman?

So it's a film which is a pre-Cold War movie

and helps us understand the Cold War movies that are to come.

What is fascinating about the way that Carol Reed

and his cinematographer Robert Krasker

filmed The Third Man is they draw on so many elements of the past.

Film noir, certainly, but they go back even further.

They go back almost to German expressionism.

They go to the Italian neo-realists,

I would say in some shots they even go back to Eisenstein

and the Russians with the sort of fantastic close-ups of weird faces,

the crazy angles, the sort of tilted camera,

which is known as the Dutch angle, the wide angle lenses,

and above all the way the city is lit

and the chiaroscuro shadows.

All of this is all germane to what we now know as film noir,

which is an umbrella term, it's not a genre,

but this is actually pushed to its absolute extreme

in this film, and it creates an atmosphere that is both

realistic and dreamlike simultaneously,

and that is remarkable.

Do you believe, Mr Martins, in the stream of consciousness?

Stream of consciousness? Well...

Well...What author has chiefly influenced you?

Grey.Grey? What Grey?

Zane Grey.Oh, that's Mr Martins' little joke.

Of course, we all know perfectly well Zane Grey

wrote what we call Westerns - cowboys and bandits.

Mr James Joyce. Now, where would you put him?

Would you mind repeating that question?

I said, where would you put Mr James Joyce? In what category?

Can I ask, is Mr Martins engaged on a new book?

So many directors talk about The Third Man in ways

that you wouldn't even expect.

So there are films like Miller's Crossing,

the crime film by the Coen Brothers,

which visually references The Third Man a lot.

But even outside of crime or horror,

or the kind of genres you might expect to

take influence from The Third Man,

there are directors like Clint Eastwood who said

the lighting of The Third Man inspired Unforgiven, his Western.

People like Martin Scorsese, who've written

sort of essays and odes to how much he loved the film

when he first saw it as a kid on TV in the 1950s.

And so it is a film where the legacy lives on

beyond just where you would expect in many ways.

And the theme music, of course, was also a huge influence

on Nino Rota for La Dolce Vita.

So the music as well has really lived a full life since 1949.

It quite frightened me in parts. I felt uneasy.

Yes.

But I think there is a lot of romance in it.

Yeah.

But it's... It's really a flawless film of its kind, I think.Yes.

There's nothing to match The Third Man.

All right.

(GUNFIRE)

Now, there's obviously a myth around Orson Welles

and his participation, and how complicated

he might have been to work with.

But in terms of the sewers, can you maybe give us

a picture of what Orson Welles was and wasn't

willing to do in terms of filming?

Well, the first time Orson was required in the sewers,

he was required for a close-up.

And when it was ready, they called him and he came down.

But he saw the crew, including Joe Cotten,

Trevor Howard, eating sandwiches...

..and went sort of berserk and said

this was unhygienic, disgusting.

And they just got the close-up.

And he utterly refused to ever go down the sewers again.

And for that reason, Vincent Korda, who was the art director,

had to build a set in London.

It's easy in hindsight to say it was a classic

and all those things, because we've seen the film, but...

did you sense a certain kind of magic under way

as you watched scenes being shot?

No, I don't think so.

When you're working in films, you always hope that the end product

will be successful and enjoyed by the public,

but no, we all just hoped the film would be a success.

We had no idea.

I mean, the whole film is pretty bleak, isn't it?

Yes.

I mean, the whole atmosphere of the film is quite frightening.

I find it. And Holly... this writer of Westerns

is coming into this...he didn't understand at all.

But in a way, Holly was us, because we didn't realise

Europe was like that in those days.

(CHILD'S VOICE) What is it?

Porter's been murdered.

(SPEAKS GERMAN)

(SHE SPEAKS IN GERMAN) They think you did it.

It was a bleak, quite forbidding place.

It hadn't really reached the post-war years

when everything got better economically.

It was right down, and that was...it was a portrait of Europe.

I don't think I've ever seen another film,

which wasn't a documentary

which was so good at painting what Europe was in those years.

Of course, you have a romance that isn't a romance at the centre.

Yes.With Alida Valli.Yes.

The Third Man is a film that starts and ends

with the same man's funeral

back here at the Zentralfriedhof cemetery

in another shot cemented into film history.

Holly will wait for Anna,

still a fool for love, despite everything.

What are your memories of shooting the final scene of the Third Man,

which is another that has sort of become part of its mythology?

Well, it was my unit that shot that, so I do remember it rather vividly.

Carol said to Guy, "Put her back there."

And we did take one.

And she walks. And she walks.

Take two - "Put her further back, Guy."

And then it was the third take.

"Put her further back, Guy."

And... Which he did.

And she did the walk.

The office was saying, "You have to cover it, Carol."

And he said no.

And there was no way he was going to cover it.

That was his idea and his decision.

And personally, I think it was the right one.

Because I think from legend, Graham Greene wanted a happy ending.

And in Graham Greene's novella, it's a happy ending.

But it was Carol who said, "No, no, no.

It has to be her walking past him

and sort of past the camera and out of the shot.

Yes, it was, and he wouldn't do an alternative take at all.

Well, Selznick didn't like the ending, that's for sure.

And I don't think Korda did much either.

In fact, Graham Greene was doubtful, too.

But Carol wanted it that way,

and in the end, Greene agreed with him and thought it was right.

Funny thing is that Holly, I mean, he didn't know what was happening.

Joseph Cotten was sitting there waiting for the director to say cut.

He didn't, and he kept on smoking his cigarette as the girl went past.

And he was still smoking, he thought,

"What am I going to do? What am I supposed to do?"

Finally, when Carol said cut...

"Oh, thank God."

Had no idea it was going to be so difficult.

He didn't know what the ending was going to be, apparently.

So... But it was a coup, the ending, I think he was right too,

And it made the film a little bit darker.

(ZITHER PLAYS)

AcccessibleCustomerService@sky.uk