Where to watch The Third Man (1949)
The Third Man is available to stream in ES on Prime Video and FILMIN. It can also be rented or bought from Amazon and AppleTV.
In postwar Vienna, a pulp writer arrives to meet an old friend, only to learn that the friend has died. Suspicious details surrounding the death lead him into a dangerous investigation involving divided authorities, shadowy criminals, and the dead man’s grieving lover.
Cast: Alida Valli, Joseph Cotten, Trevor Howard, Orson Welles, Paul Hörbiger, Ernst Deutsch, Erich Ponto, Siegfried Breuer, Hedwig Bleibtreu, Bernard Lee, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Alexis Chesnakov
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Trivia & production notes
- Graham Greene wrote a novella as a film treatment before scripting the screenplay, working out the story's atmosphere and characterization, which was later published as a book under the same title as the film.
- Carol Reed and producer David O. Selznick clashed over the ending, with Selznick wanting the hopeful conclusion from Greene's novella where the main characters walk away together, while Reed insisted on a more ambiguous finish that he felt was more honest.
- Greene met Elizabeth Montagu in Vienna, who gave him tours of the city's sewers and black market nightclubs, experiences that informed the film's setting and story.
- Orson Welles contributed the famous 'cuckoo clock' monologue, which Greene confirmed was written by Welles himself and inserted during shooting to adjust timing, though the sentiment originated from earlier sources including 19th-century painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
- Principal photography took six weeks in Vienna and wrapped on December 11, 1948, after which production moved to British studios where interior sequences and sewer scenes were completed by March 1949.
- Orson Welles became difficult to work with on set, complaining about shooting in the actual Vienna sewers; this forced assistant director Guy Hamilton to serve as a body double and led to those scenes being relocated to UK studios.
- Director Carol Reed operated with four separate camera units simultaneously shooting around Vienna throughout production and used Benzedrine stimulants to work around the clock.
- Anton Karas, an unknown zither player in Viennese wine gardens, was discovered by Carol Reed and composed the film's entire score; he worked with Reed in London for six weeks on the music.
- The original British release featured director Carol Reed's uncredited narration describing post-war Vienna, which the American version replaced with Joseph Cotten's voice-over as the main character because producer Selznick thought American audiences would reject the seedier tone.
- The American theatrical cut removed eleven minutes of footage from the original, including a shot of a near-topless dancer that would have violated the Hays Code at the time.
Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Third Man, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.
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