Reed · 1949
Carol Reed and *The Third Man*
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.
It is twenty past two on the afternoon of an unrecorded Thursday in November 1948, in the bombed-out Hofmosaiken courtyard of the Schönbrunn Palace in the Russian-occupation-zone of Vienna, in the pale autumn light off the Donau-side Schönbrunn formal-garden ruins. He is forty-two years old. He is Sir Carol Reed, born at Lansdowne House in Putney, London, on the thirtieth of December 1906, illegitimate son of the theatre-actor Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and the actress May Pinney, schooled at the King's School Canterbury, in the film industry since the 1924 King-of-the-Damned cinematography assistantship, knighted in the 1952 honours-list for services to the British film industry.
He has, in the eight-week schedule since the fifteenth of October, shot most of the Vienna location-sequences of The Third Man. The final-chase Vienna-sewer sequence is the pre-arranged shooting-priority of this week.
He thinks: the Vienna I am shooting is the actual postwar Vienna of November 1948, three years into the four-power occupation (the American, British, French and Soviet zones), with the Russian-zone Schönbrunn Palace still bomb-damaged from the 1945 Battle of Vienna, the Inner-Stadt-streets still rubble-strewn, the economic-collapse-and-racketeering scenario of the Greene screenplay matched in pre-cinema-vérité documentary fidelity to the actual-conditions of the city.
He thinks: the Anton Karas zither-score is the most-important late-stage casting decision of the production. Karas's zither-music is, in plain reading, the musical sound of the actual postwar Vienna. The zither-score will, on the film's 1949 release, become the most-recorded film-theme of the immediate postwar period.
He thinks: the Orson-Welles casting of Harry Lime, signed-on by Selznick in mid-September 1948 in Paris-Hotel-Lancaster negotiations, will give the film the iconic-cameo it needs. Welles will be on set for about eleven days in the late-November and early-December schedule. The Welles ferris-wheel-soliloquy on the Wiener Riesenrad (the cuckoo-clock-speech that became the most-quoted line of the film) was written by Welles on the spot during the shooting and is, by Greene's private agreement, the only line of the screenplay that is not Greene's.
The Third Man completed principal photography on the eleventh of December 1948. The post-production at the Shepperton Studios in Surrey ran through the spring of 1949. The Anton Karas zither-score was recorded at the Sound-City studios at Shepperton in May 1949. The final cut ran a hundred and four minutes.
The Third Man premiered at the Plaza Cinema on Piccadilly Circus on the thirty-first of August 1949 and at the Cannes Film Festival in September 1949, where it won the Grand Prix du Festival (the equivalent of the modern Palme d'Or). The American distribution followed in February 1950. The Academy Award for Best Cinematography (Robert Krasker) was awarded at the 23rd Academy Awards in March 1951. The Karas Harry Lime Theme (also known as the Third-Man Theme) reached number one on the Billboard charts in the United States in May 1950, was the best-selling instrumental record of 1950, and is, by the BMI-licensing-records of 1950–2000, one of the most-recorded film-themes of the twentieth century.
Sir Carol Reed was knighted in the 1952 New Year Honours for services to the British film industry, the first British film director to receive a knighthood. He directed Oliver! (1968), winning the 1969 Academy Award for Best Director. He died at his Chelsea home at 213 Kings Road on the twenty-fifth of April 1976, sixty-nine years old. He is buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in west London. The Third Man is, by the 2000 British Film Institute's Top 100 British Films of the Twentieth Century, the foundational British film-noir; on the 2017 BFI Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics' poll, The Third Man ranked seventy-third worldwide. The Vienna-sewer sequences are the most-toured location of the Vienna tourist-route, with the Third-Man-Museum at 25 Pressgasse in the Wieden district open to the public daily.