The script was by Graham Greene, author of "This Gun for Hire" and "The Power and the Glory." Both novels were made into films but fell far short of their possibilities. "This Gun for Hire" was about a lonely Cockney assassin named Raven with a speech impediment. The action in the novel takes place in London in 1938 when it looked as if war were imminent.
Translating from Print to Screen
The film was made in 1942 with Alan Ladd as an Americanized Raven, sans speech impediment. The film lacked the terse style, atmosphere and colorful characters of the book. "The Power and The Glory" was made in 1947 as "The Fugitive" by John Ford with Henry Fonda improbably playing a Mexican priest.
In the book, the priest is an alcoholic, living with a widow. But in 1947, the U.S. Production Code and the Catholic Church made it impossible to directly transform Greene’s novel to film. It was a curious choice for Ford, described by my good friend Gil Perkins as a "deathbed Catholic." When the film lost money, it sank Ford’s independent film company Argosy Pictures.
"The Third Man" tells the story of dime novel writer Holly Martin
(Joseph Cotton) coming to Vienna to look up his old college
chum Harry Lime. He arrives to find that Lime has died, run over by a car in a freak accident, and so, he attends his funeral.
I will tell you he learns that a "mysterious "Third Man" helped move Lime’s body out of the street after the accident.
In his memoirs, David Selznick claimed that his major contribution to the film was to insist that Holly Martin be an American instead of a Canadian as he was in the original draft of the screenplay.
As the tenacious but not too bright Martin, Joseph
Cotton tours post-war Vienna looking for clues as to what really happened to his old friend. In the process, he falls in love with Lime’s girlfriend, played by the Italian/Austrian actress Alida Vali.
Discovering Truth About Lime
Cotton discovers that his old pal was a real rat, mixed
up in the black market, and he was about to be nabbed by either the English, the Americans or the Russians. He finds out that Harry is very much alive, and learns the sordid truth about his old friend’s activities at a run-down carnival in the Russian sector of Vienna.
As Harry Lime, Orson Welles is only on the screen for nine minutes. But in that brief period he walks away with the film. Welles had fled to Europe allegedly to avoid a huge back tax bill. Edward Ashley told me, however, that the real reason Welles left for Europe was to get out of his contract with Republic Pictures boss Herbert
Yates.
Yates, whose forte was Westerns had allowed Welles to
make "Macbeth" at Republic in return for directing his wife
Vera Ralston in her next film. Welles, according to Ashley, fled to
Italy rather than make another film at Republic.
When Welles and Cotton finally meet in the Russian-occupied
zone and ride together in a rickety old ferris wheel, it’s a classic
scene.
In the oft-quoted climax as Welles takes his leave, he admonishes Cotton, "During the reign of Ceaser Borgia, the Italians had thirty years of warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci and the Renaissance. The
Swiss had five hundred years of peace and brotherly love, and
what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!"
Robert Krasker won an Academy Award for his haunting "Third
Man Theme," played on a zither. Selznick in 1950, closed his
production and distribution company, and he left with Jennifer
Jones for Europe.
Look Who Was Behind Wheel
Dan Pattachia, later a City Councilman and Mayor, began in Culver City as a chauffeur for David Selznick. In a 1993 interview, he recalled driving Alida Vali around town. He remembered that she spoke only Italian at the time and was utterly charming.
She had been brought to Hollywood by Selznick to star in his ill-fated "The Paradine Case" with Gregory Peck, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Vali replaced Greta Garbo. Garbo was to make her comeback in the story about an English barrister who falls in love with his client who is accused of murdering her husband. The film was panned by the critics but was more appreciated in later years.
When I interviewed Pattachia, he spoke fondly of Selznick. He recalled that as Selznick was about to leave for Europe, he was approached by David Sarnoff who wanted him to enter television production. Sarnoff had first hired Selznick to run RKO back in 1932.
I called Pattachia and asked him if he could recall the
conversation he had overheard between Selznick and Sarnoff.
Dan assured me that he could. Two days before we were to meet, he died of a heart attack while playing golf.
