When the British film crew arrived in Vienna, they found the streets had been cleared of debris. The ambience they had envisaged for their feature film, The Third Man, was compromised. A disbelieving Graham Greene, the script’s author and a well-known novelist, disappeared off to a seedy club to get plastered. Seven months earlier, at the end of winter, Vienna had been devastated when the writer visited to scout his screenplay. There was rubble and broken masonry everywhere, with blasted buildings collapsed into streets and the main thoroughfares littered with the scorched shells of military vehicles. Greene had crafted a…