Reed

From the fifteenth of October 1948 to the eleventh of December 1948, on location in the four-power-occupied city of Vienna, Sir Carol Reed, forty-two years old, the London-born British film director of Odd Man Out (1947) and The Fallen Idol (1948), shot the eight-week principal-photography schedule of The Third Man, the Graham-Greene-screenplay (commissioned by Reed and the American producer David O. Selznick over a airline-cocktail-napkin in February 1948) about a American pulp-novelist Holly Martins arriving in postwar Vienna to take up a job offered by his old-school-friend Harry Lime and discovering that Lime is involved in a racketeering operation in stolen-and-diluted penicillin. The film starred Joseph Cotten as Martins, Alida Valli as Anna Schmidt, Trevor Howard as Major Calloway, and (in a late-recruit casting that became the most-iconic cameo in British film history) Orson Welles as Harry Lime. Reed shot the Vienna sequences in the real ruined-city locations (the bombed Wiener Riesenrad ferris-wheel at the Prater, the American-zone Hotel Sacher, the Russian-zone Schönbrunn Palace, the final-chase Vienna sewers under the city), in the deep-shadow black-and-white expressionist photography of Robert Krasker. The zither score by the Viennese folk-musician Anton Karas (discovered by Reed at a Heuriger wine-tavern in the Grinzing district in October 1948 and signed on the spot for the film score) became the most-recorded film-theme of the late-1940s. The Third Man won the Grand Prix at Cannes 1949 and the Academy Award for Best Cinematography 1950. By every careful judgment of British film-history (Charles Drazin, Peter Cowie), The Third Man is the foundational British film-noir of the Cold War period.

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