Grove Koger

Chances are you’ve seen the classic 1949 movie The Third Man more than once. I certainly have, and I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve thrilled to this bleak but deeply evocative masterpiece.

The film owes its popularity to a rare combination of talented individuals: novelist Graham Greene, director Carol Reed, cinematographer Robert Krasker, actors Orson Welles (seen below in one of the film’s key moments) and Joseph Cotten, and a virtually unknown Viennese musician.

The story of the film’s origin is complicated, and the most detailed account I’ve run across is Charles Drazin’s study In Search of the Third Man (Limelight Editions, 1999). In a nutshell, Greene had been invited by producer Alexander Korda to discuss a new film project. As Korda envisioned the work, it was to be directed by Reed, who had turned Greene’s story “The Basement Room” into the 1948 film The Fallen Idol. It so happened that, a short time before the meeting, Greene had come up with the outline of a novel about a dead man who turns out not to be so dead after all. Greene envisioned setting his novel in London, but Korda wanted the new film to take place in postwar Vienna, which was then divided, like Berlin, into four sectors ruled, respectively, by the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. To allow the writer to experience the ruined city firsthand, Korda arranged for him to fly there—in frigid, dreary February.

Over time, most of the elements of the film fell into place, but it lacked a musical score, a lacuna that normally would have been filled by a professional composer writing for a professional orchestra. However, Reed had heard a zither player at a reception thrown for the film crew on the day of their arrival in Vienna, and while he wasn’t familiar with the zither—a multi-stringed plucked instrument common in Central Europe—he couldn’t get its slithery sound out of his head. Reed arranged to meet the musician, a man named Anton Karas who played for tips in local taverns. Working through an interpreter, Reed urged Karas to forget the schmaltzy standards that he relied on and, instead, to play something original. And it was apparently at that point that the musician tried out a few bars of that would eventually become “The Third Man Theme.”

At first, Reed thought that the tune might simply lend the film a few moments of local color, but the more he heard it, the more he liked it. Someone else who liked it was Austrian film editor Oswald Hafenrichter, who argued for making greater use of Karas’s music. Reed eventually came around to Hafenrichter’s point of view, and, against considerable objections from the studio, insisted on using it throughout the film. He flew Karas to London in May of 1949, gave him a room in his own house, and showed him how to time his music while watching cuts of the film on an editing machine. (You can watch him playing a medley from the film here.)

Repeated as it is throughout the film, Karas’s melancholy music eventually begins to grate on the viewer’s nerves like a dentist’s drill, and today it’s impossible to think of the film without it.

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