The Third Man and the Cold War

First, must remark that you were lucky to watch one of the great films in the history of cinema. It features: A powerful story and script by the English writer Graham Greene, brilliant filmmaking by the director, Carol Reed and his cinematographer Robert Krasker. Add to this the captivating score by the Austrian zither player Anton Karas and unforgettable acting by Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli. In a survey of British film critics some years back it was chosen as the most highly rated of British films ever.  For my part, I find it unforgettable as cinema. For the purposes of this class, I think the film is enormously useful. The film is a remarkable window on a pivotal moment in the history of postwar Europe.

It was shortly after the war, 1947 or 1948, that Alexander Korda had the idea of making a film about occupied Vienna. Korda, a popular film producer in Britain, had emigrated from Hungary himself. He asked Carol Reed to begin work on the film. And Reed, in turn, invited Graham Greene to visit the city and write a script. Greene spent weeks in Vienna in February of 1948, researching the occupation, the blackmarket, and the cafes. He wrote a novella that would be the basis for the screenplay. It’s a great thriller – full of unexpected twists and brilliant characters – that also presents some powerful moral dilemmas.

When we talk about the film tomorrow, I’ll suggest that the film offers a distinct perspective on the Cold War. The emergence of the Cold War was the backdrop to the making of the film. While Greene was writing his novella, officials in Prague, Czechoslovakia were purging non-Communists from the government. While the film was being shot in Vienna, the Russians blockaded the city of Berlin, another city under four power control, ratcheting up tensions with the western powers. When the film first appeared in theaters in Britain and the U.S., officials from both countries were hammering out the details of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The filmmakers set out to make an entertaining thriller, not a political speech on the Cold War. Nonetheless, I think we can read the film as a distinctly British perspective on the global tensions that strained Europe in these years.