The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that.
You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed and set in a battered, broken, postwar Vienna. It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Orson Welles as Harry Lime and there’s sterling support from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White, whose comic cameo almost steals the show. Vienna is the real star of course, shot in brooding black and white at unsettling angles by Robert Krasker (who won an Oscar for his efforts), and you’ll recognise Anton Karas’s haunting ding de ding de ding de-ding dum dum dum zither music if nothing else.
I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm
The Third Man is part thriller, part romance, part mystery, part comedy and wholly brilliant. If you haven’t seen it, please do. And if you have seen it, please see it again for it reveals something new with each viewing as, indeed, does Vienna itself, a famously inscrutable city.
I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm… (Sorry, couldn’t help myself, that’s the film’s first line.) Nope, I don’t go that far back but I do know it a bit, having stayed there often with my bonkers, beloved late godmother, Sarah Gainham, once of this magazine and author of a much-lauded Vienna-set novel: Night Falls on the City.
Prompted by TTM’s anniversary, I went back the other day and stayed at Hotel Die Josefine, a deliciously eccentric boutique hotel on Esterhazygasse, blessed with a fabulous roaring twenties-style basement cocktail bar – Barfly’s. I barely made a dent in its list of 400 cocktails, 500 rums and over 1,200 whiskies, but knew in a trice that it was my kind of place. I couldn’t stop smiling.
My first stop was the Prater with its giant Ferris wheel (once the world’s tallest), upon which Martins and Lime ride and where Lime delivers Welles’s famously improvised lines about Switzerland and cuckoo clocks. I did one gentle circuit on the wheel, hummed a bit of Karas and bought myself a disgustingly tasty käsekrainer at Bitzinger’s Würstelstand before heading off to meet Gerhard Strassgschwandtner, founder and proprietor of The Third Man Museum near the Naschmarkt.
It’s a bit homespun, the museum, but for Third Man obsessives like me, utterly absorbing. There are over 3,000 original items on display, including shooting scripts, cameras, props, costumes and clapper boards, Karas’s original zither and uniforms, posters and literature from the Four Power occupation of Vienna. It’s gripping stuff.
Few Viennese have seen – let alone heard of – The Third Man, but the delightful Gerhard knows it inside out and has developed a walking tour, complete with invaluable paperback guide, that takes in all its major locations. I begged him to show me just a couple and saw the manhole through which Lime scrambles down into the sewers; Lime’s apartment at 5 Josefplatz and – most thrilling of all – the doorway in which we first glimpse Lime in the shadows, the cat toying with his shoelaces. I felt childishly excited.
So excited, in fact, that I had to ground myself with some fine Viennese beer and so made straight for the Gösser Bierklinik in Steindlgasse. This is as trad a Viennese restaurant as you will find (in business since 1566) and something of a place of pilgrimage for me. I first went with my godmother when I was ten and go back whenever in town. The menu of Wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut, duck and red cabbage, liver and onions, never changes and nor does its dusty décor. There’s a cannonball embedded in the wall (supposedly from the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683) and a model dragon whose mouth opens and eyes flash when you pull its tail. It delights me to do this as much at 64 as it did at 10.
I also like to discover new Vienna and did so via cocktails at Das Loft, a trendy bar on the top floor of a swanky hotel with gorgeous views of the city; the Leopold Museum (the Belvedere ain’t the only place that boasts fine Klimts) and C.O.P. – Collection of Produce – a stunning modern restaurant where I had one of the most enjoyable meals of my life, dining on fire-roasted bone marrow on charred bread; burned beetroots, pickled chicory and labneh; egg yolk raviolo, Jerusalem artichoke cream and sage butter and dry-aged ribeye washed down with 2012 Sonntag geschlossen Grüner Veltliner (I had no idea GV could age so well) and 2022 Markowitsch Pinot Noir.
‘A person doesn’t change just because you find out more,’ says Lime’s abandoned lover, Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli). Well, nor does a city. Vienna remains as beguiling as ever.
The Third Man fan’s guide to Vienna
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17.04.2024
The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that.
You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed and set in a battered, broken, postwar Vienna. It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Orson Welles as Harry Lime and there’s sterling support from Alida Valli, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee and Wilfrid Hyde-White, whose comic cameo almost steals the show. Vienna is the real star of course, shot in brooding black and white at unsettling angles by Robert Krasker (who won an Oscar for his efforts), and you’ll recognise Anton Karas’s haunting ding de ding de ding de-ding dum dum dum zither music if nothing else.
I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm
The Third Man is part thriller, part romance, part mystery, part comedy and wholly brilliant. If you haven’t seen it, please do. And if you have seen it, please see it again for it reveals something new with each viewing as, indeed, does Vienna itself, a famously........
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