Carol Reed and The Third Man

Some films are written, cast, and shot, and then become themselves only in the editing room. Others find their soul in a single chance encounter, in a back room, on a wet evening, when a director who has been listening for months at last hears the sound he did not know he was looking for. The decisive moment in such a film is not the script conference, nor the first day of principal photography, nor the premiere. It is the moment a stranger is asked to play.

THE DIRECTOR AND THE CITY

Carol Reed is forty-one when he flies into Vienna in February 1948 with Graham Greene to walk the four occupied zones. He has been in the picture business since 1924, has just made Odd Man Out and The Fallen Idol, and is now, by common reckoning in Wardour Street, the most assured British director of his generation. The illegitimate son of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, schooled at the King's School Canterbury, he carries himself with the courteous detachment of a man who has learned early not to claim a name too loudly. He listens more than he speaks. He has learned, in the cutting room, that a film is built from what the camera overhears.

The Vienna he finds is not a set to be dressed. It is a city under four flags, the inner Stadt still a quarter rubble, the Schönbrunn pocked by the shellfire of April 1945, penicillin sold by the gram on the black market and cut with chalk until children in the wards go blind. Greene has come back from a fortnight in the city with a fragment in his notebook about a man buried whose coffin turns out to hold someone else. Reed reads the fragment and understands at once that the screenplay will write itself out of the streets if he lets it. He goes home and tells Selznick he will shoot on location, in winter, at night.

THE EIGHT-WEEK SCHEDULE

Principal photography begins on the fifteenth of October 1948 and is to run eight weeks. The unit works through three shifts, day on the British and American zones, evening on the Russian, the small hours in the sewers under the first district where the Hauptkanal carries the Wien river under the streets. Joseph Cotten plays the American pulp-novelist Holly Martins, Alida Valli the actress Anna Schmidt, Trevor Howard the British military policeman Calloway. Orson Welles, signed in mid-September in negotiations at the Hotel Lancaster in Paris, is due on set in late November for eleven days as Harry Lime.

Reed shoots with Robert Krasker in a deep black-and-white in which the wet cobbles do half the lighting. He tilts the camera. He has been warned in London that the Dutch angles will look like affectation; he keeps them in. The city is leaning. The frame should lean with it. By the third week the unit has settled to its rhythm, and Reed, who sleeps four hours a night on benzedrine and tea, walks the locations after wrap to think.

THE HEURIGER AT GRINZING

On an evening in late October he is taken out by the production manager to a Heuriger in the wine villages on the slopes above Grinzing. The room is low-ceilinged, the new wine is sharp, the lamps are paraffin. A short, heavy-set man in his middle forties sits in the corner with a zither across his knees and plays for the tables. He is Anton Karas. He plays the old Viennese tunes, the Schrammelmusik of the suburbs, and a piece of his own he calls nothing in particular. The notes drop out of the instrument with a hard, dry, plucked sound, neither sentimental nor martial, the exact sound, Reed hears in a single instant, of the city he has been photographing for two weeks.

He sits very still. He has been chasing, since the read-through in London, a question he has not been able to phrase. The Greene screenplay is not a thriller and not a romance. It is a moral problem in a ruined city. Music in the conventional manner, a full orchestra under Sir Hubert or whoever, will turn it into a melodrama overnight, will load the air the camera has been so careful to keep light. He has heard Viennese waltz arrangements proposed and rejected them. He has heard nothing he wants. Now, in this room, over a glass of new wine which he is not drinking, a stranger is playing the answer.

He thinks of the cost of being wrong. Selznick is already nervous about the budget. A zither, a single instrument, an unknown musician with no English and no film experience, scoring an entire feature alone: it will be laughed at in the screening room at Culver City. He thinks of Odd Man Out, scored by William Alwyn in the proper manner, and of how the proper manner would suffocate this picture. He thinks, very briefly and very clearly, that he has spent twenty years in the industry learning to recognise the moment when the right thing is also the unorthodox thing, and that a director who cannot then act on the recognition is of no use to anyone. The piece ends. The room applauds politely. Reed stands up and walks across the floor.

He asks, through the production manager, whether the gentleman would consider coming to London after the shoot to record a score. Karas, who has never been on an aeroplane and has never seen a film studio, says he will think about it. Reed says he will wait. They sit until the lamps are turned down and an arrangement is reached.

THE WHEEL AND THE SEWER

Welles arrives on the twenty-first of November and is on set, by Reed's careful accounting, for eleven working days. The Wiener Riesenrad sequence is shot in the cold of the last week of November, the great wheel turning over the Prater in the thin afternoon light. The speech about the cuckoo clock and the Borgias and Switzerland is written by Welles on the morning of the shoot, on the back of an envelope in the production car, and offered to Reed in the lift up to the platform. Greene, in London, will later concede in a letter that the lines are not his and that they should stand. They stand.

The sewer sequences are shot through the first week of December, in the Hauptkanal under the Inner Stadt, in waders, under arc lights brought down on cables from the manholes. The chase, the shot, the hand reaching through the grating: each set up, each lit, each broken down in the stink of the river. On the eleventh of December 1948 principal photography is complete. The unit comes out of the sewers into a grey Vienna morning and goes home.

SHEPPERTON, SPRING

Karas comes to London in the new year. He is installed at Shepperton with a zither, a metronome, and a moviola on which the cut footage is run for him reel by reel. He speaks no English. Reed sits beside him through the spring of 1949, marking cues with a pencil, conducting with a finger on the arm of his chair. The score is recorded at Sound City in May. It runs the length of the picture, a single instrument carrying ninety-three minutes of film, with no orchestra behind it and no song over the titles. In the dubbing theatre at Shepperton the engineers shake their heads. Reed keeps it in.

The picture is cut to a hundred and four minutes and previewed in July. The Selznick organisation, in Culver City, asks for a happier ending in which Anna takes Martins's arm in the cemetery avenue. Reed and Greene refuse. The long final walk, the woman passing the man without looking, is held.

THE PLAZA AND AFTER

The Third Man opens at the Plaza on Piccadilly Circus on the thirty-first of August 1949 and takes the Grand Prix at Cannes the following month. The American release follows in February 1950. Robert Krasker takes the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in March 1951. The Karas piece, released as The Harry Lime Theme, reaches number one on the Billboard chart in May 1950 and is, by the licensing returns of the next half-century, among the most recorded film themes ever written. A man who two years earlier had been playing for tips in a wine garden is the best-selling instrumentalist in the United States.

Reed is knighted in the New Year Honours of 1952, the first British film director to receive the title. He directs through the 1950s and 1960s with steady competence and one further peak, Oliver!, for which he takes the Academy Award for Best Director in 1969. He dies at 213 King's Road, Chelsea, on the twenty-fifth of April 1976, sixty-nine years old, and is buried at Kensal Green. By the British Film Institute's polls at the close of the century The Third Man stands as the foundational British film of the postwar period, ahead of every other British title of its decade.

THE ROOM IN THE GRINZING

The decisive thing in a director's life is rarely the picture he is offered; it is the courage to keep listening when he is already inside the picture, and to recognise, in a stranger across a room, the sound he has been failing to name. Reed had learned, in twenty years of cutting other people's footage, that a film's character is not imposed on it but overheard. In the Heuriger at Grinzing, on an evening in late October 1948, the overhearing reached him in a single phrase from a zither, and he had the wit not to mistake it for atmosphere. The whole afterlife of the picture, the awards, the chart, the seventy years of audiences leaning into that opening title sequence in which a single string plucks out a melody that the orchestra never arrives to support, follows from that decision.

At 25 Pressgasse in the Wieden district, in a low building over the Wien river, the Third Man Museum is open to the public daily. In one of its rooms, behind glass, lies Anton Karas's zither.