A narrow, dimly lit street, night time, post-war Vienna. American hack novelist Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) is slightly inebriated. He hears someone shuffle in a dark doorway. The countenance of the concealed man is briefly illuminated by an apartment light. It is a man he had presumed dead: his old friend Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles. In an instant, the scene provides one of the most iconic moments of 20th-century cinema.
Lime dashes from the doorway and Martins pursues the fugitive along dark rain-soaked streets. But he is only chasing a shadow, cast monstrously high and uneven on the facades of buildings. He turns into a deserted plaza, but Lime has vanished. Martins is too late.
Director Carol Reed’s The Third Man delights in the idea of being too late. He had visited Vienna with writer Graham Greene in June 1948 to complete a first draft of the screenplay, and the two were instantly seduced by the war-torn city and its enigmatic inhabitants.
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They were too late to experience the cultural magnificence of the Hapsburg Empire, of which the city had been the capital. Instead, the director and novelist revelled in the inspiration they found in the seedier corners of a rubble-strewn Vienna.
Here was a city politically divided and policed........