The Third Man

Carol Reed’s film won Cinematography, Black and White at the 23rd Academy Awards; Robert Krasker took it. Reed lost Directing and Oswald Hafenrichter lost Film Editing the same night. At the third BAFTA ceremony it won Best British Film and lost Best Film from any Source to Bicycle Thieves. At Cannes in 1949 it took the festival’s main prize, then called the Grand Prix. Anton Karas was an unknown zither player in Vienna’s wine gardens. Reed brought him to London for six weeks of work on the music. Reed had first pictured the zither folded into an orchestral score; his editor, Hafenrichter, talked him into leaving the instrument alone and running it through the whole picture. So the man the Academy nominated for cutting the film settled how it would sound. The tilted angles did not convince everyone. C. A. Lejeune of The Observer called them distracting, and William Wyler mailed Reed a spirit level, suggesting he put it on the camera. Harry Lime’s cuckoo clock speech was written by Orson Welles, not by the credited writer Graham Greene. A good fit if the wrecked city matters more to you than the solution to the killing, and a sewer chase reads as weather. Not for viewers who will take the slanted frames and the lone zither as showing off.