The Girl in The Third Man

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 story that relied on the character of this ruined, broken city, as when he likened the shattered Prater fairground to bones jutting through snow.[1]

Vienna was much the same when the author returned with the film’s director Carol Reed in early June. Over a fortnight the pair had physically paced out scenes around the city, firming up the storyline and establishing continuity. When finished they had a strong draft script, complete with the locations where scenes would be filmed.

But the civic authorities had thrown themselves into busy activity over the summer months. So when the cast and crew arrived in the city in late October the international zone within the Ringstrasse was tidy, if still wartorn, and the Western occupation authorities had swept away the worst of the chaos in their respective sectors. Not a burnt-out tank was to be seen.

After looking around, the director and cameramen wondered if they could shoot more outdoors in the Soviet sectors, which were still an undisguised mess.[2] Russian soldiers had other ideas. The film unit would set up, then burly men in uniforms would appear, bellowing “Nyet! Nyet!” Ruins were not to be photographed, for no one was to show the Soviet sector in an unfavourable light. The unflappable Carol Reed would flourish official paperwork giving permission to film, but the Russians (even if they could read) had other ideas and tried to halt work. It then usually turned into a shoving match, with the belligerent soldiers grabbing at equipment.

At the initial encounter the Russians did actually yank the cinecamera away from its operator after a first take. The next time, at the railway station, Reed and his indignant crew wrestled with the soldiers, refusing to surrender their gear. There was a confrontation again when they were shooting at the Prater, a ruined amusement park where the main character, Holly Martins, was to face Harry Lime. Even when the outdoor unit filmed an innocuous scene where four conspirators meet on the Deutschbrücke—the only undamaged bridge across the Danube—Soviet soldiers still harried the crew to finish and move on.

It was urgent that shooting be completed quickly. And not just because the film crew was working to a tight three-week schedule. The political climate in Austria was unpredictable and edgy in October 1948. The Berlin Airlift was under way and many Viennese feared their city was likewise about to be isolated by Soviet forces. Given the tense state of the Cold War, Reed wanted to wrap up the location work speedily and fly back to London before something erupted. Which was probably why he organised shooting into three units—each filming at a different time of day—directing them around the clock, while living on Benzedrine and snatching a couple of hours exhausted sleep whenever he could.[3]

The film aimed to transplant the urban nightmare thriller of Hollywood’s film noir to a war-ravaged European capital. Its plot centred on Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), a happy-go-lucky writer of cowboy stories, who has arrived in Allied-occupied post-war Vienna—a traumatised city overwhelmed by criminal corruption. This American innocent is shaken to find that his boyhood chum Harry Lime (Orson Welles) has just met with a fatal accident, and, worse still, is suspected by the military powers of running a racket in adulterated penicillin. Martins gets mixed up with Harry’s Czech girlfriend Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), and a sequence of shady eccentrics, in search of the unidentified “third man” said to have witnessed Lime’s death. Of course, as readers familiar with this cinema classic will know, Lime turns out to have faked his own demise to escape Major Calloway (Trevor Howard) who is cracking down on the lethal black market in medicine.

This project was prompted by the British producer Alexander Korda’s urge to access film profits effectively locked on the Continent due to post-war financial restrictions. If his company’s box office takings could not be remitted back to London without incurring prohibitive duties, it was possible to spend them on the Continent to fund film production there. So Korda devised a scheme to use this money on hiring facilities and talent at a foreign location, even where possible remunerating some of the British crew in European currency. This is how the screenplay’s author Graham Greene came to purchase his famed villa at Capri after shooting was completed—Korda covertly paid him the equivalent £5000 offshore, not in Britain. Indeed, when final studio shooting in London was held up for several weeks, Korda parked the leading actors at a lavish hotel in Paris. It made best financial sense.

Korda had commissioned Greene to write a thriller set in either Vienna or Rome. Both cities had extensive studio facilities and equipment available for lease, as well as film production crew and quality actors desperate for work. An expenses-paid trip for the author to prepare his story was sorted out by Korda’s company, and Greene flew off. He spent three weeks in bitterly cold Vienna, followed by a few tense days stuck in Prague (he arrived as the communists overthrew the Czech government), before proceeding to Rome. After a week in the Italian capital, he continued southward to the Bay of Naples where he enjoyed warmer weather while speedily drafting a novella-cum-storyline. He began writing on March 2, 1948, and completed his treatment on April 24.

Greene liberally adapted material from real life when crafting his initial manuscript. In Vienna’s exclusive Sacher Hotel he had run into the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, who was making a lecture tour for the British Council.[4] They dined together, talking shop and swapping gossip. Bowen’s experiences with Europeans keen to learn about modern literature were hilariously transmuted into Holly Martins’s inept lecture to bewildered Viennese intellectuals. And Greene had a fruitful encounter with Peter Smolka, local correspondent for the Times, who, among other information on local crime, alerted the author to the contraband market in penicillin and a mounting death toll from contaminated medications.[5] Smolka also explained Vienna’s convoluted policing arrangements caused by mistrust between the four occupying powers.

The writer added to his mix colourful snippets previously gathered when he worked for British intelligence. Greene’s wartime service with the SIS has served critics with a ripe opportunity for speculation and embellishment. The plain truth is that he largely handled paperwork. “Most of his work was routine,” his biographer Michael Shelden explains. “He kept his files in order, sent coded instructions to Lisbon, and discussed strategy with his chief.”[6] So if Greene was promoted to head the Portuguese desk in 1943, he found the work monotonous, and always wanted to get back to serious writing. Nevertheless, the SIS did provide some entertaining material he later put to literary use. The 1958 novel Our Man in Havana, for example, was based on a resourceful anti-Nazi in Lisbon who, entirely on his own initiative, invented a fictitious spy network to sell false information to the gullible Germans.[7]

For The Third Man, Greene plainly drew from a stock of tales confided by Kim Philby, the head of Section V. The two had struck up an affable camaraderie when Greene joined the SIS, lunching together often, nipping off to a club after work, founding what would be a lifelong friendship (they still corresponded after Philby defected).[8] Some of Philby’s yarns involved the 1934 February Uprising when, as Viennese fascists shelled workers’ housing estates, he used the sewer system to help fugitives flee the searching Heimwehr.[9] The film’s plot not only hinged on this same element: Michael Shelden wonders if in shaping Harry Lime, a charming and duplicitous crook, Greene used aspects of Philby’s life and personality.[10] Certainly the character Anna Schmidt was inspired by Litzi Friedman, a young Jewish socialist Philby had married in Austria to place under the protection of his British passport.[11]

The creative strengths of The Third Man were due more to accident than planning.[12] Carol Reed was wrestling with unexpected pressures throughout. From the moment the project was approved, both Alex Korda and David Selznick were looking over the director’s shoulder and giving (sometimes contradictory) orders.[13] They wanted a movie which would appeal to audiences not just in Britain and its dominions. They had their sights on the lucrative American market. This was why, when finished, The Third Man resembled a Hollywood-style thriller. It also accounts for the producers’ casting the actors Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles for the roles of Martins and Lime. These were distinctly British characters in Graham Greene’s treatment, but American stars were mandatory for hearty US attendances.[14]

Problems did not ease once Reed and his crew were on location. Besides Soviet obstructiveness, there were countless practical difficulties to filming in Vienna. Reed and his cinematographer Robert Krasker (who had recently shot both Brief Encounter and Odd Man Out) had conceived of the film as stylistically recalling Bill Brandt’s brooding photographs of nocturnal London during the Blitz. But many scenes could not be filmed as they envisaged. So cinematic details now praised by scholars were often due to decisions made on the run.

Still, shooting was unexpectedly eased by Austrians hired to support the British crew, especially a local cameraman assigned to the third unit, Hans Schneeberger. He was not listed in the final credits, although Schneeberger had been respected in the Austrian movie industry since the 1920s, having even worked with Arnold Fanck and Leni Riefenstahl. His cinematic fingerprints are all over The Third Man.

This is instantly evident when we look closely at Reed and Krasker’s earlier big project Odd Man Out of 1947. If lighting is shadowy and dramatic, the cinematography is wooden in what is very much a studio production. Scenes often resemble a play in a small theatre, with the camera shifting between a view from an imagined dress circle, to conventional close-ups of the lead actors. Many shots are neatly squared, with tilts, perspectives and Dutch angles never seen. In comparison The Third Man is not only more technically informed and adventurous, it also employs camerawork typical of Schneeberger’s 1940s productions for Wien-Film.

The British unit to which this veteran cinematographer was assigned found he worked quickly. Using an old-fashioned Éclair camera, Schneeberger had flair, and composed shots in ways unimagined by the newcomers.[15] He designed the constructivist-style shot looking down from high up where the four conspirators meet on the Deutschbrücke. An impressed Carol Reed increased the Austrian’s responsibilities, and other cameramen were soon seeking Schneeberger’s advice. The British crews learned quickly, as evident in how an assistant cameraman, Guy Hamilton, who was to get facial close-ups of people on streets at night, embraced throughout Dutch angles (canted shots), a stylistic feature of Central European films. This raised eyebrows across Hollywood: the director William Wyler mailed Reed a spirit level along with the mocking note, “Carol, next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera.”[16]

Actually, The Third Man begins and finishes with Schneeberger’s adept camerawork. He selected and filmed all of the opening montage, including the striking image of a corpse floating in the icy Danube—his own idea. Likewise, the movie’s closing shot where Alida Valli walks towards the camera along a tree-lined avenue in Vienna’s cemetery was Schneeberger’s design.[17] He even flaunted his skill by having Valli begin her walk three times further back from where Carol Reed suggested. No other cameraman could hold the focus. When shooting finished that day, the crew gave Schneeberger a spontaneous ovation.

Eighteen months later Alex Korda’s in-house cinematographer Robert Krasker may have been awarded an Oscar for The Third Man, but it was due in no small part to Hans Schneeberger’s uncredited work.

The performance of Orson Welles as the elusive Harry Lime was equally decisive to the movie’s achievement. Where this amoral charmer came from—Lime is unlike any figure in Greene’s prior fiction—and how it was crafted into The Third Man, is untouched by critical discussion.

In his younger days Graham Greene had ambitions to write quite commercial books, so before the Second World War he tried his hand at several popular genres. Stamboul Train of 1932, his first money spinner, was an adventure story pastiching contemporary thrillers, while Brighton Rock—the 1938 novel that brought him critical acclaim—adheres to a 1930s vogue for gritty British crime stories.

This low-life genre is now forgotten, even if titles like The Gilt Kid, a best-selling 1936 yarn by James Curtis about a cockney burglar, remain an entertaining read. Most influential at the time was Robert Westerby’s bleak violent tale Wide Boys Never Work. Released in 1937, this sordid story was a publishing sensation and sparked calls for censorship. Besides appealing to a popular readership, Wide Boys Never Work hooked some discriminating book-lovers—John Lehmann and Leonard Woolf were admirers—who praised it as a potent Hogarthian view from beneath. When in 1942 the print industry was hit by wartime restrictions and book-runs were heavily cut, Methuen was permitted a large second edition. Later still, Lehmann himself brought out an up-market collector’s edition in early 1948.

Written with grim flair, Westerby’s novel portrayed the violent world of “wide boys” (from wide-awake or quick-witted, the pre-war slang for a “spiv”) who lived by theft, extortion, confidence tricks, gambling rackets and prostitution. The central character is a would-be tough from the Midlands who, fired from his factory job for horsing around, decides to make good in the foggy capital. He buys a train ticket, travels south, then hooks up with a prior criminal contact who gives him work as a muscled minder in the underworld of Soho and the West End during the Depression. Much is depicted in terse vivid prose: a dodgy used-car business in Fitzrovia; gambling dives in Soho; the White City greyhound track; seedy rooming houses in Marylebone; a Bayswater boxing gym; a covert gay club off Regent Street; gangsters, con men, prostitutes; razor fights between gangs; communists spruiking in Hyde Park; Mosley’s thugs spoiling for a punch-up.

Wide Boys Never Work, which exuded authentic literary strengths, was a manifest influence on Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock. Greene visibly dances with this source in several chapters, putting his own stamp on an evolving new genre by exploring the characters’ psychology and introducing a religious element. Brighton Rock became his watershed work. He never dipped back into popular fiction. So it comes as a surprise to find an obvious version of Westerby’s memorable shyster Graham Swing—called Harry Lime—figuring in the treatment for The Third Man.

This archetypal con man of Wide Boys Never Work had come equipped with a colourful biography. Forced to leave an inconsequential public school, Swing had been “given up as a disgraceful disappointment by a family steeped in the best traditions of the Civil Service”.[18] We learn that already in adolescence he was manipulating others, especially an unidentified younger boy at school. Graham Swing had soon found his metier as a salesman in dubious goods, being blessed with “an eye for a snip and a mug to take it that amounted almost to genius”.[19] He views these customers with disparaging contempt. Besides his affable patter—we are told the Old School Tie and drawling voice are essential to his act[20]—Swing uses a seeming middle-class respectability to attract victims while breezing by the police, for he “looked like what passes in a good many places for a gentleman—which he wasn’t”.[21] Mixing with hardened gangsters, he has ambitions to shift to serious crime.

There is little mistaking Graham Swing as a source for Harry Lime in Greene’s original storyline. Possibly, given that John Lehmann’s reissue of Wide Boys Never Work had just appeared, Greene had re-read the novel and seen a useful figure he could develop (Westerby was himself now a Hollywood scriptwriter). But in shooting on location, Carol Reed and Orson Welles, the film’s director and the actor cast as Lime, would reinvent what had been an obvious London spiv.

Their first decision involved costume. Harry Lime was not dressed in the “wide” attire affected by London’s smarter criminal fraternity. No bespoke grey suit, dark blue tailored shirt, flamboyant silk tie, or spiv’s dapper trilby. Instead, Welles was fitted with a long, thick black coat which buttoned nearly to the neck, as well as a black scarf and broad-brimmed black fedora. Seen amid the ruins of Vienna, this attire reeked of comfort and expense without linking Lime to a distinct criminal class. He was, literally, an indistinguishable dark figure.

The second decision concerned Lime’s dialogue in the ferris wheel above the Prater. Welles does not exude the bitter contempt towards average people of Westerby’s con man. There is no hatred, no malice in him. Instead, the American gives his character a bemused arrogance: as conveyed in his comments about the people in the ruined park beneath. Harry Lime sees himself as looking down on everyday people from on high. Welles’s version of an amoral criminal treats life as an entertaining game in which, savouring the spoils of corruption, he steers others around like clueless pieces on a board.

In so doing Welles endows upon Lime his own giant-sized ego. The actor was determined never to be eclipsed in any film, and in the fleeting appearance of his character in The Third Man he went all out to establish a grand presence.[22] This was why, as in Citizen Kane, he barges in on Joseph Cotten’s lines.[23] Carol Reed allowed him to tailor his own lines until they felt comfortable, and while Welles stuck closely to the script, he did add remarks for Lime’s leave-taking of Holly Martins:

In Italy for the Thirty Years War under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock! So long Holly.

There were hoots of laughter on set when Welles tried these lines in a run-through before filming. They seemed preposterously out of character for a black marketeer. But Reed deferred to his star, so it was shot.[24] Reed felt Welles—himself a gifted director—had valuable cinematic intuitions. Welles suggested the fingers coming through the grille for when Harry was trapped and dying in the sewer.[25] Reed thought it inspired and used it. Likewise, the proposed cuckoo-clock passage may have been Orson Welles grabbing a chance to ham it up; but when treated seriously it became a definitive moment for the movie.

The final element shaping Harry Lime arose from the actor’s petulance. On his first day of scripted shooting in Vienna, Orson Welles made a prima donna-like commotion and walked off. The historian Charles Drazin explains:

His first scene was in the sewers. Carol Reed noticed some water cascading from a duct. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, he suggested, if the fugitive Harry Lime were to run underneath this fall. The water pouring down on his face offered marvellous scope for drama.[26]

In his volatile reaction Welles declared he would not be working in the cold, or wet, or anywhere “filthy”. So, far from being shot on location, those memorable moments when Harry Lime is glimpsed in a doorway at night, or lies bleeding in a sewer, were filmed at Shepperton studios outside London.[27] In fact, during several weeks in devastated Vienna, the star’s acting consisted of a single day’s shooting in which he walked across the Prater fairground to the ferris wheel, then walked across the Prater fairground away from the ferris wheel.[28]

Carol Reed therefore found himself with the prospect of needing to use on location an acting double for Welles. Discussing the possibilities with the cameramen, they agreed on a pivotal creative decision. Harry Lime, this minotaur hiding in a sinister labyrinth beneath the ruined city, would be barely be seen. Visually, their film would use ambiguity and suggestion to hint of something wicked in the shadows.

This was why, when Holly Martins first chases Lime through dark wet streets at night, we do not see a fleeing figure. Robert Krasker’s camera stays with Holly in his confused pursuit, the viewer being given only a running shadow on a wall and the echoing sound of footsteps.

As for the evocative scenes underground, the sewer unit cameraman Stan Pavey had been planning shots that distilled aspects of Peter Lorre’s performance as the elusive murderer in the 1931 Fritz Lang film M.[29] Not having Welles to work with was, for Pavey, a bonus. Now he could use darkness, the brick tunnels, rushing water, and a vague figure to heightened effect. So, later in the film, when the torch-bearing Austrian police pour into the sewers to catch the fugitive, Lime’s figure appears as a shadow among shadows.

Given current anxiousness over asylum seekers, the character of Anna Schmidt seems hauntingly of our times. Her name, a Teutonic version of Ann Smith, smacks of an alias. A question mark hangs over her background and Anna is fearful of the authorities discovering her identity. We soon learn she holds forged identity papers, which, she explains, Harry Lime obtained through criminal contacts. Late in the film she admits to having fled Czechoslovakia, so if detected the Russians will send her to Prague to face punishment—effectively a death sentence.[30] Anna neither pleads her innocence nor reveals what offences she is accused of.

Anna’s plight instantly clicked with cinema audiences in 1949. Many were aware that Czechoslovakia witnessed the worst reprisals against Germans in formerly Nazi-occupied Europe.[31] Atrocities instigated by Czech civilians abounded after the Reich fell, with random massacres, casual executions and torture culminating in death being so widespread and numerous as to constitute a spontaneous ethnic cleansing. There was no mercy for the elderly or women or children. The streets of Prague were a gruesome sight in the first week of freedom: mobs clubbed frightened Germans senseless, then, stringing them up by their legs from lampposts, splashed them with petrol and set fire to what became shrieking human torches.[32]

Meanwhile, the rape of German women and girls by arriving Soviet forces washed like a vicious flood across the country, sparing none. When a foreign Red Cross nurse tried to protect an eleven-year-old in Moravia, one reported story ran, the Russian soldiers grabbed the nurse and all five raped her.[33] Compounding this brutality, the Red Army was a disease carrier. At least a tenth of rape survivors were infected with gonorrhea or syphilis, while paratyphus, carried by human lice, soon spread through Russian-occupied Europe.[34]

The most renowned Soviet atrocity in Czechoslovakia was the “Brno Death March” where, after the Red Army had taken the town, massacred men in uniform, and violated anyone in a ragged skirt, 25,000 brutalised German civilians were forced to march along the road to Vienna. Exhausted and sick stragglers were beaten and shot along the way. The exact figure is disputed, but it is estimated 8000 lost their lives. When they reached the border with Austria, guards there would let only those who could prove Austrian or German citizenship cross into the country, so the Czechs set up an impromptu transit camp for the human surplus. There were more daily atrocities, then typhus broke out.

Stability came when a new Czech government was installed. But in February 1948 it was ousted by a communist putsch. Czechoslovakia then succumbed to a sequence of purges designed to scoop up anyone whom the Soviets and their local allies disliked.[35]

Even if audiences were hazy about reprisals at war’s end, they were conscious of what was occurring in Central Europe as the film was screened in Western cinemas: no wonder Anna Schmidt is keeping clear of the Occupation police.

But who precisely is this German woman: an ethnic Sudetenlander, a German immigrant who arrived after 1938, or someone implicated in the Nazi occupation? Through Anna Schmidt we see the complexities of a seeming refugee. Oblivious to such questions, Holly Martins perceives this vulnerable, attractive girl as an innocent victim of circumstance, one of the numerous displaced persons battered by war and its aftermath who is trying to stay out of Russian hands. So, besides venting his anger at official procedure, Martins cannot understand the detachment of Major Calloway.

As a professional dealing daily with a refugee crisis, the British officer knows not to accept sob stories at face value. There were 600,000 displaced persons in Austria during 1948, the perfect camouflage for anyone trying to avoid detection. Confusion at war’s end had seen countless Nazis and their supporters melt without trace into a vast tide of suffering humanity; and the emerging Cold War with the Soviets was presenting further opportunities for those with a murky past to equip themselves with sanitised new identities. Perhaps Anna Schmidt is a fugitive from legitimate justice. Besides, Calloway is determined to crack the black market ring peddling sham medication. And, given Schmidt’s racketeer boyfriend ran the vile scheme, her innocence needs to be proven.

The pretty European girl that early viewers empathised with is barely recognisable as the Czech woman in Graham Greene’s draft for The Third Man. This was because, to attract high attendances, Anna Schmidt’s character had been adjusted with an eye on a new cinema trend soon to be named film noir.[36]

Three factors were propelling this American film genre. One was economic.[37] Wanting to manufacture popular films on a minimal budget, the studio chief Jack Warner had focused his company on crime stories. These movies could be made with cheap contemporary sets, no expensive costuming, and, by making use of dramatic shadows and sinister darkness, electricity costs might even be lowered. So Warner Brothers developed their signature urban crime thrillers.

There was also stimulus from European production values.[38] The appearance of film noir was linked to the migration of talent from the Continent to Hollywood in the 1930s, the new crime genre arising stylistically from a merger of different creative standards as American studios took on Central European staff. And last was a direct literary influence, with the swing to crime films being inseparable from the swelling market for American “hard-boiled” novels.[39] Movie producers saw potential profits in adapting this gritty trend from commercial publishing. So besides filming versions of best-selling novels by the likes of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and Raymond Chandler, Hollywood’s major studios recruited as screenwriters quite a roll call of detective fiction writers.

While it was an emphatically British movie, The Third Man aimed to be noir in style, having urban scenes lit throughout in a dark and shadowy manner, and also noir in theme by using a plot that was grim, cynical and bleak. Of course, in American movies the latter values would be embodied in the outlook of the girl, as famously played by Barbara Stanwyck (Double Indemnity, The File on Thelma Jordan, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers), Joan Crawford (Possessed, Mildred Pierce), Jane Greer (Out of the Past) and Gloria Grahame (The Big Heat, In a Lonely Place).[40] But these cynical and dangerous femmes fatales are far from Greene’s initial female lead.

The girl in hard-boiled fiction and related American film is an active participant in the criminal underworld; although, as in his earlier crime thriller, Brighton Rock, Greene makes the girl an innocent drawn into a life she does not understand. And, if the girl of hard-boiled novels is sexually desirable, Greene repeats his Brighton Rock move of making her unremarkable. This original Anna Schmidt is, like her name, rather plain and ordinary. When she appears in Greene’s story, it is said of her face: “It wasn’t a beautiful face … Just an honest face; dark hair and eyes which in that light looked brown; a wide forehead, a large mouth which didn’t try to charm.”[41] Nor is this Anna Schmidt the accomplished stage actress we see performing early in the film. In the written draft, Martins complains:

I had to see the whole dreary comedy through a second time. About a middle-aged composer and an infatuated girl and an understanding—a terribly understanding—wife. Anna acted very badly—she wasn’t much of an actress at the best of times.[42]

Then there is the story’s ending where Anna pairs up waif-like with the now dependable Martins, unlike the movie where she walks off stone-faced and alone, leaving him at the cemetery.

It is striking how dissimilar the girl in the story and the girl in the finished film are. The literary critic John Spurling has remarked that the leading ladies in Greene’s fiction are “ghosts” who are mostly used to flash at the reader the image of the protagonist.[43] This fairly much describes Anna’s role in the manuscript where she stands in for the absent Harry Lime, supplying a favourable explanation of his nature. About the only thing this draft character had in common with the hardened women of film noir is that she is the property of a gang boss.

The film version of Anna Schmidt is a consequence of production disputes. Besides insisting the character be re-written, David Selznick wanted final say in casting an actress. In his first discussions with Alex Korda and Carol Reed during May 1948 he suggested Alida Valli for the role; although late the next month, dissatisfied with a re-write, Selznick told Korda they may have to use Barbara Stanwyck, Hollywood’s archetypal femme fatale.[44] Selznick admitted he didn’t want to do this because Valli was perfect if the script was changed. (Besides, if the screen predator Stanwyck took the role, it would have been more in keeping for Anna to have slept with Major Calloway, murdered Harry Lime, framed Martins for racketeering, and taken off with the money.[45])

Wounded by life, the femme fatale of hard-boiled fiction and film noir exhibits the pessimism of a sexually aggressive woman existing among people without moral fibre. As a victim of abuse she has no illusions about happy endings, having endured a pattern of deceit, disappointment, hurt and abandonment. She distrusts authority because it has shown itself to be dishonest, while she spurns as fools those individuals who offer genuine kindness or compassion. Not believing in romantic love and willing to use sex to get her way, the femme fatale craves assurance through wealth and status. She also attaches herself to an alpha brute as, besides supplying the comforts she requires, he protects her. Better the devil you know!

It was left to Carol Reed and Graham Greene to work closely on the female character. They studied women in a bundle of recent American movies. Not impressed, they discussed traumatised people they had encountered. The pair now gave Anna Schmidt the resignation of a displaced person suffering from brutal experiences.

The new Anna settled on by Reed and Greene expects betrayal. The authorities—be they British, American, French, Soviet or Austrian, not forgetting Czech and Nazi—have pushed her around. As well as being used by those who are meant to be trusted, she has been let her down by people close to her. Far from being a manipulative vixen, this Anna was listless and indifferent when she hooked up with Harry Lime, a charmer, a crook, a self-absorbed scoundrel. Still, he provides what she wants until seemingly being killed. Then Holly Martins happens along, a man who is loyal and steadfast to his friends, and Anna is tempted to put faith in humanity. But, in the film’s last reel, she finds Holly, like every other man, is prepared to compromise. Worse still, he betrays his best friend, Harry Lime. Her hopes dashed, the movie ends with Anna Schmidt choosing her future at the cemetery. Not even glancing at Holly, she walks away, now transformed into a cynical femme fatale.

Selznick kept up pressure on Reed as script revisions mounted. Almost daily he sent cables querying Anna’s dialogue, vocabulary and actions. Selznick also made Alida Valli delay leaving for Europe, instructing her to travel slowly and not fly: “We will not permit Valli to sail from New York until and unless there is expression from Korda and from Reed on what we regard as absolute necessary additional scenes and rewrite,” a memorandum on October 19 ran.[46] The actress had still to see a script in any form, while Reed and his crew were poised to depart for location shooting in Vienna.

Never having felt so harassed over a script, Reed told Selznick’s representative he was about to chuck the film in. The final straw seems to have been over costume. Selznick pressed for Anna—a refugee—to wear glamorous clothing, including an evening gown. Reed was beside himself. “Carol said that he would sooner get right out of the whole thing than have endless trouble,” ran a confidential message sent to Hollywood.[47] Reed wanted to be “left to his own devices”, and he was prepared to walk if American interference continued.[48]

Whether he was sincere or calling Selznick’s bluff, Carol Reed now finally wrestled control of The Third Man. Intelligent, cleverly executed, woven through with potent undercurrents of emotion, it would hardly be the film the British director had expected to make when he took on the project. Instead The Third Man was already becoming a hybrid, the result of countless improvised decisions made by professionals who knew their craft.