The Third Man
Shown: 11 November 2000
Sponsored and introduced by Harry
Patterson
UK 1949
104 minutes
Directed by Carol Reed
Leading players - Joseph Cotton, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard
Synopsis
Brilliantly simple. Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) a pulp fiction writer arrives in post war Vienna to find that his old school friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is dead in a road accident. At the funeral Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) tells him that Lime was in the black market, the contaminated hospital drugs having killed children. Lime's girlfriend Anne Schmidt, an actress, won't have it. When Cotton discovers a mysterious "third man" was connected to Lime's deal, he decides to stay in Vienna and hunt him down.
Rubble strewn, bombed out Vienna, ruined by six years of war, cigarettes the main currency, dark, shabby, a hint of danger everywhere, is perfectly evoked by this wonderful noir movie, backed by the haunting music of the Karas zither. I know this because as a young soldier on security duties I served in Vienna in 1948 which was the main filming year of The Third Man. It left me with a rather jaundiced view of people in general and human nature which to a certain degree has coloured my life. One hint of the zither music and I'm back there, nineteen years of age and up to my neck in it.
Harry Patterson
