The Real Third Man in The Third Man Was The Music

 

On Saturday evening, I went to the Harvard Film Archive to attend a screening of The Third Man starring Joseph Cotten, Valli, Trevor Howard and, of course, Orson Welles.

The screening is part of a retrospective of Graham Greene's novels and novellas adapted for the big screen.

Prior to the screening there was a lengthy introduction to the film by one of the staff members whose name I cannot recall. For the most part, I find these introductions to be largely unnecessary. You may recall that I was rather perturbed with Foster Hirsch's soliloquys during the film noir series which took place at the Brattle Theatre back in June. 

However, I will give Hirsch his due in this respect. His remarks were off the cuff. Tonight's introduction was read which made the proceedings that much more tedious. 

Although the one notable part of those remarks was that a point was made of stating that Orson Welles had no role in directing The Third Man which was entirely Carol Reed's baby. It was explained that Welles had other projects going on at the time and was not on the set long enough to have done anything beyond improvising a line or two of dialogue. Yet it has remained an urban legend for decades.

A synopsis of the film is in order. Author Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) comes to post-WWII Vienna to visit his friend Harry Lime only to discover that his friend was killed in a traffic accident. At Line's funeral, Martins encounters Anna Schmidt (Valli) who was Lime's lover as well as Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) and it becomes clear to Martins that Lime's death was not an accident. 

Martins learns of a third man who helped carry his friend's body across the street. Yet more than two-thirds through the film we learn in spectacular fashion that the third man is none other than Harry Lime himself (Orson Welles). Nothing is ever as it seems.

The one constant in The Third Man and perhaps the true third man is the music composed by Austrian zither player Anton Karas and now I can't get the "Harry Lime Theme" out of my head. What is most astonishing is that Reed discovered Karas by chance while visiting a wine bar and asked him to compose the music for the film on the spot. One can only imagine how different the film would have been had Reed not ventured into that wine bar.

Indeed, the first image you see on the screen in the background behind the words are the strings to a zither. I would be remiss if I did not mention that we had a zither much the like pictured below.

Perhaps it is fitting that a zither was prominently used in The Third Man because the audience is certainly being strung along.

Even after the film, we were treated to an original trailer of the film zither and all.