The Third Man At 75

Back in cinemas to mark the 75th anniversary of its release, Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) is still regarded at the best British film ever made. Cinema Paradiso reveals how luck and judgement contributed to the making of a masterpiece.

When the British Film Institute commissioned a poll to discover the best British films of the 20th century, David Lean had every right to be proud of himself, as Brief Encounter (1945), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Great Expectations (1946) were voted second, third, and fifth, while The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) missed the Top 10 by a single place.

It was pipped by Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), which itself just trailed Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Red Shoes (1948). Striking blows for relative modernity, at eight and seven, were Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973) and Ken Loach's Kes (1969). One of only three features from the 1930s to make the entire Top 100, Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935) cropped up at No.4, while Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) snagged sixth spot for Ealing, the most commended studio on the list with seven titles, all of which were produced during a six-year spell prior to 1955.

The remainder of the list is rather random and reflective of academic trends and popular tastes around the Millennium. Down at No.77 was Oliver! (1968), the winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture of its year. It was the only other title on the list to have been directed by Carol Reed, a film-maker whose versatility had prompted some to rank him among the best in the world in 1949, when he made his masterpiece. This was before les politiques des auteurs shifted the scholastic assessment of cinema. But, even at the height of auteur theory's primacy, it was agreed that the finest British film of all time was a work of genuine, if occasionally fractious collaboration. Indeed, it's safe to say that it's the sum of its key and highly distinctive contributions that makes The Third Man (1949) so exceptional, entertaining, and enduring.

Bogart or Bacon

Cinema-going reached new heights in Britain in the immediate postwar period. In 1946, 36.1 million tickets were sold each week, as people sought an escape from lingering wartime traumas and the stark realities of Austerity. The conflict had meant that hundreds of American films had yet to be shown in the UK, but screening the backlog came at a price, as the weakness of the economy meant that Britain could only afford to spend so many dollars each year and, as Conservative MP, Sir Robert Boothby, put it in 1945: 'If I am compelled to choose between Bogart and bacon I am bound to choose bacon at the present time.'

Two years later, Clement Attlee's Labour government was forced into sharing Boothby's viewpoint and, in August 1947, an ad-valorem tax was imposed upon imported films. Unconcerned by the monetary crisis facing Britain, the Motion Picture Export Association, acting for the Hollywood studios, took all of two days to ban British films from US screens. When President of the Board of Trade (and future prime minister) Harold Wilson consulted Britain's leading producers about making up the shortfall to keep exhibitors and the public happy, he was dismayed to discover that, while the film industry had managed to perform minor miracles while on a war footing, it simply didn't have the capacity or the personnel to increase annual output from 100 features to 400. Already aware that more households were steadily turning to television, the Cinematograph Exhibitors Association declared in 1948: 'It is the biggest threat to our future yet...In the end there won't be enough cinemas open for our films to pay their way - which means our studios would close down.'

Under pressure from the US State Department, the Attlee government decided to compromise. However, in return for Hollywood being able to recoup $17 million in profits each year, they would have to accept a 45% quota favouring homemade movies in British cinemas. As a result, Bogart and bacon were back on the menu. But British producers found themselves in a worse position than ever before when it came to trying to break into the American market.

Hungarian exile Alexander Korda had spent much of the 1930s trying to get a foothold in the United States. Things had started promisingly, when he directed Charles Laughton to the first Oscar win by a British performer in The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933). But a distribution deal with United Artists had not boosted the prospects of ambitious pictures like William Cameron Menzies's Things to Come or The Man Who Could Work Miracles (both 1936), which Korda had co-directed with Lothar Mendes.

During the war, however, Korda had used his connections with anti-fascist colleagues across the beleaguered continent to pass secrets to the Allies. As a consequence, Korda reasoned that, as he was on such good terms with his European counterparts, it made sense to embark upon collaborations that would enable him to access assets that had been frozen by governments facing their own recovery crises. Indeed, it was with this strategy in mind that he approached novelist Graham Greene to see if he had any storylines that could be set against the Four Power occupation of Austria and its humbled imperial capital, Vienna.

Heading to Greeneland

It was sometime in 1947 that Korda sounded out Greene about a film with a backdrop of the division of Vienna into zones controlled by American, British, Soviet, and French forces. A former critic who had once had harsh things to say about some of Korda's releases in his column in The Spectator, Greene had acquired a reputation for dividing his work into serious novels and lighter fare that he dubbed 'entertainments'. He had just finished collaborating with Carol Reed on the London Films drama, The Fallen Idol (1948), and was eager to make another feature.

However, the only plot thread he had revolved around the sentence: 'I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.' It was enough to intrigue Korda, although he had to keep badgering Greene to make progress and it wasn't until September 1947 that the 'Risen-from-the-dead story' started to take shape.

In February 1948, Greene flew to Vienna, where he was met by Korda's representative, Elizabeth Montagu. The city had been badly damaged by German and Soviet troops in the final days of the war and its imperial glory was a faded memory. Montagu served as his guide, as Greene sought a story to weave around his basic concept. 'I took him everywhere,' Montagu later revealed. 'I took him to the ruins, I took him to the places still standing, I took him everywhere you can think of, including the Great Wheel and all that. He became absolutely enamoured of Vienna.'

Greene might well have been au fait with 'Trümmerfilme' or 'rubble films' like Wolfgang Staudte's The Murderers Are Among Us (1946) and Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1947). But he knew instinctively that the bombsites had to feature prominently in his story. He also realised that the Soviets were hated and feared, as the Red Army had brutalised its way into Vienna and its troops were nowhere near as disciplined or discriminating as their British, French, and American counterparts. But, despite his awareness of the intensifying Cold War, Greene decided to downplay the ideological divide between the occupying powers.

However, during his three-week sojourn at the Sacher Hotel - which was the base for both the British military command and the press - Greene kept hearing reports of black market activity and the readiness of the Soviets to turn a blind eye to operations within its sector in return for information about refugees from Iron Curtain countries seeking sanctuary in the other zones. He also discovered the labyrinthine network of sewers running beneath the barriers that was almost impossible to police.

As Montagu was embarrassed by the nightclubs and brothels that Greene insisted on visiting for 'fact-finding' recces, she was happy to entrust him to intelligence officer Charles Beauclerk and Peter Smollett (aka Hans Peter Smolka), a Viennese journalist who had worked in Britain from 1933 before becoming the Central Europe correspondent for The Times. It's unclear which man tipped off Greene about the sewers, but it seems likely that the idea of the penicillin racket came from a story about antibiotics in a children's hospital in a collection that Smollett had asked Greene to read with a view to recommending to his publisher.

In fact, Greene had encountered Smollett before, as they had a mutual friend in Kim Philby. In addition to recruiting Smollett as an agent for the NKVD (the forerunner of the KGB), Philby had also been Greene's boss when he had worked for British Intelligence in Lisbon during the war. In the 1930s, Philby had lived in Vienna and had used his position with the Committee for Aiding Refugees from Fascism to smuggle socialists out of the city through the sewers. Harry Lime was involved with the International Refugee Office, although Greene never revealed whether Philby was the model for his anti-hero.

There was even a connection to the character of Anna Schmidt, as Philby had married a Communist named Litzi Friedmann to protect her through his British passport. Back in London, he would specialise in Central and Eastern European affairs for a news agency until his exposure in 1963, as part of the Cambridge spy ring that had also included Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Ironically, Philby became known in the press as 'the third man'.

Having completed his research in March 1948, Greene travelled via Prague to Rome, where he met up with his mistress and purchased a villa in Anacapri with his advance from Korda. As he always assembled his screenplay ideas in novel form, Greene completed his outline before returning to London in late April. This treatment would be published as a novella in 1950, although Greene made it clear that the text varied greatly from the film. As he wrote in a preface: 'The Third Man was never intended to be more than the raw material for a picture. The reader will notice many differences between the story and the film, and he should not imagine these changes were forced on an unwilling author: as likely as not they were suggested by the author. The film in fact, is better than the story because it is in this case the finished state of the story.'

In May 1948, Greene returned to Vienna with Carol Reed, so that the director could experience the local colour for himself. Moreover, the pair spent long hours in Reed's room finessing the plot and the personalities of the characters. As 'Carol hates going to bed before four,' they also drank a good deal. Yet, by the time they flew home, they had completed their screenplay.

What the Fellow Said

On arriving in Vienna to take up a job offered by his best friend, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) learns that Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has been killed by a truck outside his apartment building. At the funeral, Martins is briefed by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard), who is serving with the Royal Military Police in the International Zone that is controlled by all four occupying powers.

Having established that Martins knows nothing of Lime's black marketeering, Calloway is keen to have him leave the city. But Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee) is an admirer of the pulp Westerns that Martins writes and informs British Council rep, Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White), that the celebrated American author might be suitable for one of his cultural soirées. This invitation gives Martins the excuse to linger, as he has jumped to the conclusion that his old friend was murdered and he becomes more convinced than ever when Karl (Paul Hörbiger), the porter at Lime's building, contradicts Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) in claiming that three men helped carry the dead man's body to the kerb.

Acting like a drifter in one of his Wild West scenarios, Martins concludes that 'Sheriff' Calloway is actively seeking not to solve the crime. So, he takes it upon himself to track down Lime's girlfriend, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), to the theatre where she's performing in a costume comedy. She has little to laugh about, however, as she is Czechoslovakian and fears it's only a matter of time before the Soviets discover that her papers have been forged. Her landlady (Hedwig Bleibtreu) is most put out when Calloway searches Anna's room and Martins protests when they confiscate her passport and some letters from Lime.

Seeking to identify the third man, Martins meets with Popescu (Siegfried Bauer), the Romanian who had helped Kurtz carry Lime, and Dr Winkel (Erich Ponto), who had pronounced him dead at the scene. However, when Karl is murdered and his young grandson accuses Holly in front of a crowd of onlookers, he is forced to flee. Tired of Martins's meddling, Calloway presents him with irrefutable evidence that Lime had caused numerous deaths by selling diluted penicillin to the main children's hospital.

Eager to see Anna before he flies home, Martins spots Lime in a doorway opposite her apartment, when her cat brushes against his legs and a shaft of light falls across his face. Although he gives chase to a large square nearby, Martins is surprised to find no trace of his friend and Calloway admonishes him for wasting his time before he realises that Lime had escaped into the sewers through a door in an entry kiosk. Exhuming the coffin, Calloway finds the body of Brabin, an orderly at the hospital, who had been bumped off in Lime's place.

As the Soviets make inquiries about Anna, Martins asks Kurtz to set up a rendezvous with Lime. They meet in a cabin of the Wiener Riesenrad in the Prater Park, where Lime grumbles about a shortage of indigestion tablets, while reprimanding Martins for compromising him. He also teases him for falling for Anna, but offers him the chance to join his racket, as there is plenty of tax-free money to be made, providing one can see potential victims as merely insignificant dots. In urging Martins to cheer up, Lime parts with the words: 'After all it's not that awful. You know what the fellow said, in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.'

Appalled by Lime's flippant attitude to human life, Martins cuts a deal with Calloway to betray him in return for Anna's safe passage to Paris. On discovering the price for her ticket, however, she disembarks from the train and Martins decides to go home. Calloway detours to the hospital to show Martins the suffering caused by Lime's perfidy and he agrees to honour his part of the bargain.

On meeting Lime in a café, however, Martins is unable to prevent Anna from warning her lover and he flees into the sewers. Calloway and a detachment of the Viennese sewer police follow him and shoot at him after he kills Paine. Grabbing the genial sergeant's revolver, Martins runs after the wounded Lime. He finds him reaching up through a grille to the street and, on receiving a resigned nod, puts his friend out of his misery. At the cemetery, Martins asks Calloway to stop so that he can say goodbye to Anna. But she keeps walking along an avenue of autumnal trees, as if he didn't exist.

Enter the Meddling Mogul

Much as Korda would have liked The Third Man to be a London Films exclusive, he simply didn't have the resources to fund the picture alone or the clout to hire established Hollywood stars. In May 1948, therefore, he joined legendary independent producer, David O. Selznick (the man behind Gone With the Wind, 1939), on his yacht anchored off Bermuda.

During the cruise, the pair agreed that the Selznick Releasing Organsation should receive the Western Hemisphere rights to four London Films productions. These were to be a Powell and Pressburger adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities; a Joseph Cotten vehicle entitled The Doctor's Story; and two Carol Reed pictures, a take on Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and The Third Man.

Such was Selznick's admiration for Reed, whom he considered 'one of the finest picture makers in the world', that he invited him to join the party and discuss his plans for Graham Greene's treatment. Although the American saw the story from a different perspective, he made a number of suggestions that Reed considered constructive. Indeed, he would even narrate himself the opening speech explaining the Four Power set-up in Vienna and how Holly Martins had come to land himself in a quandary. It has been suggested that Reed claimed a couple more of Selznick's ideas as his own in order to ease them past the sceptical Greene, who regarded the American as a pompous buffoon.

When interviewed in later years about his experience of working with Selznick, Greene portrayed him as a workaholic, firing out interminable memos and chomping on Benzedrine tablets to keep him going for long hours. Reed could also be cutting in his recollections. But he conceded that Selznick had challenged Greene's happy ending, in which Anna had forgiven Martins and wandered into the sunset with him. 'Selznick felt this very strongly,' Reed explained, 'that Anna's love for Harry Lime should be fatal, especially since it seems impossible for her to be with Rollo [as Martins was called before Cotten declared the name effeminate] immediately after the shooting of her lover.'

Reed himself would devise the celebrated closing shot on location, but he recognised the validity of Selznick's insight and promised to ensure that Valli's part would be expanded. On returning to Blighty, Reed worked with Greene on the new screenplay, which was ready by the end of June. So well did the pair work together that Greene later called Reed 'the only director I know with that particular warmth of human sympathy, the extraordinary feeling for the right face for the right part, the exactitude of cutting, and not least important the power of sympathising with an author's worries and an ability to guide him'.

Korda felt it was a great improvement. But Selznick's story editor, Barbara Keon, reported that it was 'pretty bad' in wondering whether 'the story is interesting enough to be told at all'. Suitably alarmed, Selznick summoned Reed and Greene to Hollywood, where he squeezed a series of late-night meetings into his already hectic August schedule. Paramount among his concerns was the fact that Martins didn't behave like a hero. Completely missing Greene's point that he was a hack capable only of reacting to a situation like one of the cowboy characters in The Oklahoma Kid or The Lone Rider of Santa Fe, Selznick insisted that American audiences wanted their male leads to be go-getters rather than ditherers who made things worse by interfering and who couldn't address a small gathering on the crisis of faith in the contemporary novel.

While Greene made little attempt to disguise the fact he was satirising American culture in this sequence, he also made Crabbin a bit of an ass, as he had never forgiven a British Council official who had browbeaten him into giving a lecture in Vienna, only to carp that it hadn't been very good. But it's also possible to see that Martins the writer of 'cheap novelettes' who gets out of his depth in the real world was also something of a joke at Greene's own expense.

As the Berlin Airlift was taking place at the time, Selznick was irked that the focus fell on British MPs rather than the American troops he believed were preventing the city from lapsing into anarchy. Amusingly, neither party seemed to mind that the French were short-changed by the storyline. But, with the House UnAmerican Activities Committee currently investigating Communism in the American entertainment industry, Selznick was adamant that the Soviets had to be seen as the villains of the piece for trying to abduct Anna.

Selznick might have been contractually entitled to be consulted on the script, but he had no right of veto. So, while Reed and Greene promised to do their best to incorporate his screeds of notes, they had little intention of doing so. Greene considered Selznick as a Philistine, who only thought in movie clichés. Thus, he derided the suggestion that the title should be changed to A Night in Vienna or The Claiming of the Body in order to fire the imagination of American punters. Greene also claimed that Selznick had objected to scenes of a homosexual nature before remembering that they were actually from another picture he was producing. However, the gay subtext continued to bother Selznick, who wrote in one memo: 'what on earth motivates Martins in his curious and passionate interest in clearing up the reputation of a dead man who he hasn't seen for ten years...The only conclusion I can draw from it is that they slept together, and I don't mean slept, all the way through Eton.'

The relentlessness of Selznick's barrage proved too much for Greene, who had to be hospitalised in New York after haemorrhaging the night before the flight home on 22 August. But the pressure didn't ease once the pair arrived back in London, as Selznick instructed Jenia Reissar to check that his changes were being implemented and the Russian-born executive quickly alienated Korda with her blunt approach.

She raised the alarm when Korda asked Mab Poole (the wife of playwright Rodney Ackland) to tidy up a few scenes and entrusted Jerome Chodorov with the task of putting an American twang on the dialogue. Reissar also caused a fuss about Anna's costumes, as she felt that Lime would ensure that his trophy paramour would be dressed to the nines. Reed had to explain that Anna was a small-time actress living on forged papers, so she wouldn't want to draw attention to herself. Moreover, Lime would also realise that she would stand out in a benighted city and prompt questions about his own wealth if she wore expensive outfits.

Reissar was also charged with ascertaining whether Reed and Greene were following the suggestions made in their meeting with Joseph I. Breen, the head of the Production Code Administration. He had reminded the pair about what was acceptable on American screens and ordered them to show that Martins shoots Lime on Calloway's orders and not because the racketeer had given his assent for a mercy killing. Breen also raised the concern of the Catholic Legion of Decency of Lime being buried twice in consecrated ground with grievous sins on his conscience. As a convert, Greene mischievously assured Breen that he had made sure that the right protocols had been followed. After months of wrangling, the script was finished, but Korda delayed sending it to Selznick, as his patience had been exhausted during the protracted casting process.

Cary For Harry?

Bristolian Cary Grant was Korda's first choice to play Martins. However, Grant liked the idea of taking on a villainous role and agreed to star on the proviso that he could choose between Lime and Martins when he saw the finished script. As this had failed to materialise by mid-June, Grant walked away, although he would find himself on the neighbouring soundstage at Shepperton Studios while he was filming Howard Hawks's I Was a Male War Bride (1949).

Despite being frustrated at missing out on such a superstar, Korda was quietly relieved, as he had always envisaged Orson Welles in the role of Harry Lime. However, Selznick was nervous that he had become box-office poison following the failure of Macbeth (1948) and pushed for Robert Mitchum to take the part. At one point, married stars Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck were mooted for Martins and Anna, but Selznick was keen to cast Cotten and Valli, as they were part of his stable. Nevertheless, he wasn't averse to the idea of Noël Coward as Lime and James Stewart as Martins.

When Mitchum backed away, Selznick contemplated David Niven and Rex Harrison for Lime, as they had the necessary suavity. But Reed and Korda were set on Welles, although he was proving typically slippery to pin down. Knowing he was perfect for the role, he decided to give Korda the run around to pay him back for his reneging on a deal to adapt Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Welles had started building sets for his production when Korda withdrew and probably still had his collection of prosthetic noses on the night that José Ferrer won the Oscar for Best Actor in his self-directed 1950 version of the play. 'My whole time with Alex was things like that,' Welles later complained. 'I kept doing projects for him which I did not abandon, but which he did.'

Undaunted by the lukewarm reception afforded Macbeth, Welles had decided to move on to another Shakespearean tragedy and was flitting around Europe trying to raise funds for Othello (1951). Hearing that Welles was in Rome, Korda dispatched set designer brother Vincent to get him to put pen to paper. By time he arrived, however, Welles had skipped to Florence and he would call in on Venice, Naples, and Capri before the Kordas finally got their man in Cagnes-sur-Mer. 'I knew I was going to do it,' Welles later joked, 'but I was going to make it just as unpleasant as possible.'

In fact, Welles's perambulations served as a trial run for his antics during the shoot. But he had one last prank to play on the Kordas in order to avenge his Cyrano disappointment. As fresh fruit was scarce in Britain, Vincent had collected a basket for his brother as a memento of his trip. 'It was too good to be true!' Welles gloated years later. 'I knew Alex wouldn't touch any of it if it had been bitten into.' So, with Vincent asleep on the flight from Nice to London, Welles took a small bite out of each item and carefully placed it back in the basket.

Trevor Howard, who had worked with Reed on The Way Ahead (1944), answered the call to play Major Calloway. But he was also on standby to play Harry Lime in case Welles failed to show up in Vienna, where experienced Mitteleuropean actors, Ernst Deutsch, Erich Ponto, and Siegfried Breuer were waiting to play Lime's cohorts, alongside 80 year-old Hedwig Bleibtreu, who had made her screen debut in 1919, and Paul Hörbiger, who had been one of the biggest stars in Austria thanks to the comedies he had made with director E.W. Emo. Although he had supported the Anschluss in 1936 and had appeared in a number of wartime propaganda films, he had been arrested for treason, as Vienna was besieged. Consequently, his presence in the cast symbolised the capital's fall from grace and its determination to rise from the ashes.

The Danube Blues

With his cast and crew assembled at the Astoria Hotel in the centre of Vienna, Carol Reed started shooting The Third Man on 22 October 1948. Karl Hartl had put the Sascha Films studio in the suburb of Sievering at Reed's disposal. Influenced by Italian neo-realism, however, he was determined to film as much as possible in authentic locations, such as the Zentralfriedhof cemetery; the entrance to Lime's Palais Pallavicini apartment on Josefplatz; the doorway in which he's first seen on Schreyvogelgasse; Am Hof, the plaza on which he vanishes in mid-pursuit; and the Prater Park with its great Ferris wheel.

As curious crowds gathered during the daytime, troops had to be called in to keep order. At night, the fire brigade frequently doused roads and squares with hoses, as Reed liked the atmospheric look of glistening monochrome streets. He was also keen to suggest a world out of kilter by shooting from oblique angles and regularly sent assistant Guy Hamilton to ask residents if they would allow a camera on their balcony or window ledge. He quickly discovered that the locals had no interest in the big Hollywood names. Yet he was welcomed with starstruck enthusiasm whenever he mentioned the name of Paul Hörbiger.

As he spoke no English, Hörbiger had to deliver his lines phonetically. By contrast, Hedwig Bleibtreu spoke only in untranslated German as Anna's landlady, as she reflected the fear the city's women had of the Red Army. Although he had no option with the Prater and the Westbahnhof railway terminus, Reed tried, as far as possible, to avoid the Soviet zone, as he made innovative use of creative geography to set scenes in the most photogenic locales. But Reed also enjoyed adding bits to the landscape, such as the fountain on Am Hof, in which Martins washes his face after losing track of Lime.

Reed also sought to include as many locals as possible to reflect the ordeal that Vienna was enduring. Thus, he sent Hamilton to a soup kitchen in the city centre to find faces he could shoot in accordance with the Soviet theory of typage. This is most readily evident in the close-ups of the onlookers gathered outside Anna and Lime's apartments, as well as in the cherubic expression of Hansel, the little boy with the ball who accuses Martins of murdering his grandfather.

Herbert Halbik was three when he filmed his scenes and he is the last surviving cast member. But nobody seems to have taken the name of the man who tries to sell Calloway and Paine a balloon, as they staked out the café where Martins was due to meet Lime. Reed had spotted him in the Prater and he couldn't resist adding a hint of Chaplinesque pathos to a bold moment of comic relief prior to the big showdown.

This, of course, plunged the action into the sewers. As Reed was a methodical worker, he decided to employ three camera units to shoot at all times of day and night in order to stay on schedule. While he resorted to Benzedrine to enable him to direct every frame, he placed Australian cinematographer Robert Krasker in charge of the first unit to shoot nocturnal sequences, while Hans Schneeberger's crew handled daytime scenes and Stan Pavey's team went underground.

Joseph Cotten complained to Selznick about Reed's leisurely approach on the set, although he was also miffed that the director knew so little about his career. Cotten was also at a low ebb, as his wife, Lenore, had recently attempted suicide after discovering that he had been having an affair. She was the only spouse in Vienna, as the pair had been trying to patch things up on holiday in Italy and he was keen to keep an eye on her. Cotten's melancholy seeps into his performance, as the sad sack whose combination of ignorance and self-pity means that he learns precisely nothing from his experience.

Cotten found empathetic drinking companions in Trevor Howard and Bernard Lee. Such was the former's eagerness to refresh himself after one particularly gruelling day that he didn't bother to change out of his costume and was accused in a Viennese bar of being a spy by the testy British major who confronted him for wearing a uniform to which he was not entitled.

Such was Reed's determination not to waste a second in the city that he started devising ingenious ways of getting around the absence of Orson Welles, who was being pursued around Italy by assistant, Robert Dunbar. Even though he wasn't as physically imposing as Welles, Guy Hamilton stood in for him in several shots, donning the bulky greatcoat and fedora that would become so iconic. In order to cast a persuasive shadow on the wall, as Lime flees towards Am Hof, Hamilton bulked out his shoulders by keeping a hanger under the coat. Reed himself supplied the fingers that reach through the sewer grille, while pork butcher Otto Schusser did the more strenuous subterranean bolting and clambering and duly got better reviews than Welles in the Austrian press.

When Awesome Orson did finally arrive in Vienna, he took one look at the sewers and declared them too unsanitary for work, especially as he was recovering from a recent bout of influenza. As they were warmer than the wintry streets above, the British crew had become acclimatised to the clamminess and the odour. But the sight of them eating bacon sandwiches was too much for Welles. He managed to get through a couple of set-ups, as his directorial nature kicked in and he stared making suggestions. However, any later claims he might have made (or were made on his behalf) about having directed his own scenes are completely unfounded.

Similarly, Welles did not write his own dialogue. Instead, he recognised that Greene was a fine author and paid him the respect of sticking to the script. Yet he did improvise the business about indigestion tablets (as he himself was suffering) and contributed the famous 'cuckoo clock' ending of the Prater speech, although that was not entirely original, as Welles paraphrased a lecture that had been given by the painter James McNeil Whistler.

Greene wasn't on the set, but he remained unconvinced by Reed's proposed ending. As he wrote in the preface to the published novella: 'One of the very few major disputes between Carol Reed and myself concerned the ending, and he has been proved triumphantly right. I held the view that an entertainment of this kind, which in England we call a thriller, was too light an affair to carry the weight of an unhappy ending. Reed on his side felt that my ending - indeterminate though it was with no words spoken - would strike the audience, who had just seen Harry die, as unpleasantly cynical. I admit I was only half-convinced: I was afraid few people would wait in their seats during the girl's long walk from the graveside and that they would leave the cinema under the impression of an ending as conventional as mine and more drawn-out. I had not given enough consideration to the mastery of Reed's direction, and, at that state, of course, we neither of us could have anticipated Reed's brilliant discovery of Mr Karas, the zither player.'

On the night the crew had arrived in Vienna, Hartl had hosted a welcome reception. Zitherist Anton Karas had been hired to provide the music and Reed was so enchanted that he sought out the club where Karas played and spent the evening revelling in the distinctive sound. Convinced the zither would provide a more evocative backing than the orchestral score that had been planned, Reed invited Karas to the Astoria Hotel and taped a number of tunes that altered his entire rhythmic approach to the action. All that he needed to do now was convince Korda and Selznick.

The Soundstage and Sound Stage

Having wrapped in Vienna on 11 December, Reed shot a couple of scenes at Isleworth Studios before taking up residence at Shepperton on 15 December. Returning after Christmas on 29 December, the company finally dispersed on 31 March 1949. As so many photographs had been taken of facades and interiors in Vienna, production designer Vincent Korda and confrères Joseph Bato and John Hawkesworth were able to construct 75 sets with such authenticity that many believed the scenes to have been filmed on location.

Backdrop painter Ferdinand Bellan made a particularly important contribution, as he matched setting and scenery with precision and speed, as Reed needed everything to be ready for the single week that Orson Welles had granted him in his busy schedule. Joseph Cotten was also on the clock, as he had recently filmed Alfred Hitchcock's Under Capricorn (1949) at MGM's Borehamwood Studios and could only remain in Britain for a limited number of days if he was to avoid a sizeable tax bill.

Bearing this in mind, Reed again employed a second unit to speed up shooting. However, no one had told the cat used in the famous doorway scene. The original choice belonged to Guy Hamilton's landlady. But she had gone away for a few days and Reed had to make do with a ringer, who singularly refused to take direction. Even when sardine paste was applied to the hems of Welles's trousers and a string was attached to his shoelaces to make them twitch so that it would play with them, the third cat used on the picture refused to play along.

The back projection of the view from the Ferris wheel car proved more co-operative and Welles and Cotton rattled off the scene in next to no time. Two days were devoted to the sewer sequence, which was filmed on exact replicas of the tunnelways that Welles had found so repulsive. He proved more genial under studio conditions, but Reed still found directing Welles stressful. Thankfully, the meetings with Lime's sidekicks, the confrontations in Calloway's office, and the British Council fiasco were filmed with little incident.

Editing in the evenings during the Shepperton shoot, Reed and Oswald Hafenrichter held Wednesday screenings for the cast and crew to show them how the picture was coming along. Viewing the rushes is usually considered a chore, but these rough cut sessions proved surprisingly popular, as people started to realise how visually special the picture was going to be. Reed upset everyone, however, by deciding to cut a montage of Viennese landmarks because the picturesque images didn't serve the story. But there was such unanimous approval of the zither music that Reed had taped in Vienna that it was decided to run the opening credits over the instrument's vibrating strings.

As the focus shifted on to editing in April 1949, Reed contacted Karas and invited him to stay as his guest in London so that they could work on the score undisturbed. Despite having no common language, the pair were able to piece together musical cues using nothing more than a Moviola editing machine and a zither. When it came to recording in a studio, however, Reed was puzzled why the instrument sounded so different. After much brain-wracking, it was decided that the acoustic equivalent of a Viennese nightclub could best be achieved if Karas played underneath a table. He was paid £300 for 10 weeks' work, but was delighted with the fee, as it enabled him to buy furniture and carpets for his apartment, which Elizabeth Montagu arranged to be shipped to Vienna.

In his review for The Nation, renowned American critic, Manny Farber, claimed that the zither score 'hits one's consciousness like a cloudburst of needles'. However, Reed opted not to use it for the climactic chase and relied on sound editor Jack Drake to concoct a mix of distorted shouts, booming echoes, gushing sluices, and clunking footsteps that was topped off with a resounding gunshot. But the zither returned for a plaintive encore, as Anna walked along the tree-lined road out of the Zentralfriedhof and into an uncertain future. By a strange quirk of fate, the plot used for the two burial scenes is now occupied by someone named Grün, which is the German for Greene!

A Masterpiece in Spite of Itself

As is revealed in Frederick Baker's fine documentary, Shadowing The Third Man (2004), Alexander Korda had not enjoyed David O. Selznick calling the shots in pre-production. But he got his revenge in post, as he played power games. He annoyed the American by postponing his first viewing of the rough cut by claiming that there had been a fire in the cutting room that had left Hafenrichter working late nights to piece together a duplicate. Yet Korda knew full well that Reed had his own copy, as he had taken it home each night to work on the music with Anton Karas. In fact, Korda and Reed were trying to reduce the time that Selznick had to fulminate before The Third Man competed at Cannes in September 1949.

For once, Selznick had nothing but praise for the picture and allowed Korda to hang on to the negative in case changes needed to be made after the festival. None were required, however, as the film took the Grand Prix that was the forerunner to the Palme d'or. Moreover, it opened to rave reviews from the British press at London's Plaza Theatre on 2 September 1949.

Despite having pronounced the film 'superb', Selznick believed it would have been better still if Reed and Greene had followed his notes. Consequently, he held a test screening in La Rochelle in upstate New York in the knowledge that an American audience would back his hunches. On the basis of the preview cards, Selznick had Joseph Cotten read a rewrite of Reed's opening spiel to make him sound more heroic, even though it gave away the fact that Martins had survived his travails in Vienna. He also ordered 11 minutes of cuts to remove material that would puzzle or offend American audiences. Martins is seen to drink less, while the dancing girl was removed from his visit to a café. Even a teddy bear was removed from the hospital scene, in case it proved distressing.

As a result, the US print ran for just 93 minutes. Yet, despite the damage the trims did to the story's pacing and continuity, this was the version that was shown in the United States until 1999 and which enthused the likes of Martin Scorsese, who would proclaim it a major influence. This bowdlerised edition debuted at New York's Victoria Theater on 2 February 1950 and quickly became a hit, in spite of such preposterous promotional taglines as 'Cats loved him - and so did Women!' and 'He'll put you in a dither with his Zither!'.

Seeing how much money the film was making Stateside, Korda decided to exploit the fact that he still held the negative to renegotiate the terms of the distribution deal. He had already persuaded his co-producer to bill the picture as a joint presentation with London Films through the Selznick Releasing Organisation. But he now wanted his fair share of the US profits.

Selznick used Jenia Reissar to convey his fury in a series of scathing letters. But, realising that his four-film agreement was dead and buried, Korda stuck to his guns and fired off a three-page broadside that left Selznick in no doubt of what he thought of him. The American responded in 10 self-justifying pages filled with insults. But Korda got his cut and Orson Welles told the story that when he saw them together a few years later, Korda had informed Selznick that he hoped he didn't die first, as he feared he would remove the details of his life from his gravestone.

In the event, Korda pre-deceased Selznick by nine years. But no one would ever forget his contribution to British cinema and the making of The Third Man. Despite the best efforts of the American partners to undermine the project from the outset, this invaluable snapshot of a time and place was hailed an instant classic and its reputation has only burgeoned over the intervening 75 years.

At the British Academy Awards, Korda had to settle for Best British Film after Best Film went to Vittorio De Sica's equally significant, Bicycle Thieves (1948). With Greene overlooked altogether, Reed and Hafenrichter had the consolation of Oscar nominations, although Robert Krasker did triumph in the Best Cinematography - Black and White category, even though John Wilcox had photographed the scene of Harry Lime and the cat, while Anna's cemetery walk was shot by Hans Schneeberger, who had been the lover of Leni Riefenstahl at the time she had starred in Arnold Fanck's silent bergfilme, The Holy Mountain (1926) and The Blue Light (1932).

Although the film sparked zithermania on either side of the Atlantic, Anton Karas initially made no money from the film. Indeed, bandleaders like Guy Lombardo had bigger hits in the US with 'The Harry Lime Theme'. But Karas was booked on to lucrative tours across Europe and got to play for Pope Pius XII, as well as King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. He used the proceeds to open a bar in Vienna before Korda arranged for him to receive a royalty for his music.

Apart from the odd snatch of the theme, this was ruinously absent when Joseph Cotten reprised the role of Holly Martins in a 1950 Lux Radio Theater version of The Third Man. Evelyn Keyes played Anna, but there was no sign of Orson Welles. However, he did record 52 episodes of The Adventures of Harry Lime (aka The Lives of Harry Lime) for the BBC. Each opened with the lines: 'That was the shot that killed Harry Lime. He died in a sewer beneath Vienna, as those of you know who saw the movie The Third Man. Yes, that was the end of Harry Lime...but it was not the beginning. Harry Lime had many lives...and I can recount all of them. How do I know? Very simple. Because my name is Harry Lime.'

Intriguingly, in the 'Man of Mystery' storyline written by Welles, Lime encountered an eccentric financier named Gregory Arkadin, who would resurface in the guise of Welles himself in Confidential Report (aka Mr Arkadin, 1955). This is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso, but we can't currently bring you the The Third Man (1959-65), a TV series co-produced by the BBC and Twentieth Century-Fox, in which Lime (Michael Rennie, the makers had wanted James Mason) was reinvented as an art dealer and globe-trotting private investigator. Jonathan Harris essayed sidekick Bradford Webster in the 77 half-hour episodes that spanned five seasons and anticipated several jet-setting hit series in the 1960s.

While Greene continued to produce exceptional novels (and entertainments), his screenplays for Ken Annakin's Loser Takes All (1956), Otto Preminger's Saint Joan (1957), and Peter Glenville's The Comedians (1967) were not of the same standard. Even a reunion with Reed on Our Man in Havana (1960) failed to conjure the same magic. Some have claimed that Reed felt slighted by the suggestions that Welles was the genius behind The Third Man and that he spent the remainder of his career striving to demonstrate his artistry and versatility with projects as different as Outcast of the Islands (1951), The Man Between (1953), A Kid For Two Farthings (1955), Trapeze (1956), The Key (1958), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), The Running Man (1963), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Flap (1970), and Follow Me! (1972)

All bar the penultimate title can be rented from Cinema Paradiso, as can several of the early outings that we shall eventually explore in one of our popular Instant Expert Guides. For now, though, it's tempting to think that there might be a modicum of truth in the old rumour that Reed lost his sense of perspective after William Wyler had been so dizzied by all the Dutch angles in The Third Man that he had sent him a spirit level to help keep his camera straight.