The Third Man

"The sequence of events, as far as I remember, is that Greene was hired to write a script for Carol Reed. He had an idea, which was simply that someone goes to a man’s funeral, and afterwards sees him in the street. That’s all it was: literally on the back of an envelope (or cigarette packet). Without giving too much away, that’s the plot of The Third Man . Greene had no idea about setting it in postwar Vienna until Carol Reed told him that’s where the film would be made. I think he went to Vienna briefly on a research trip. Greene manages to convey this sense of post-war Vienna very, very economically. In just a few sharp pen strokes he gets it—the ruins of the city. Vienna is divided into sections. There are the Russian, French, British, and American sections. No one wants to be in the Russian section because of the way the Russian soldiers behave. There’s a desperate lack of money. People are picking their way around the ruins of Europe, trying to scratch out some kind of a living. There’s also a sense of this once mighty culture that’s been reduced to its knees. Inevitably, we ask ourselves who we are, who the Allies are, what we’re trying to achieve, and whether we are morally superior to the opposition or not. Greene constructs this story. It’s incredibly taut. It’s very short, as you say, a novella. You can read it in two or three hours. Greene decided that he couldn’t write the screenplay without writing a novel first. So he sat down and wrote the novel and then translated it into a screenplay. It sounds a bit laborious, but I suppose it was a process of thinking through what is a slightly complicated plot with different moving parts. The book is beautifully done. This one character, Harry Lime—who everyone remembers from Orson Welles’s depiction in the movie—only has a few lines, a few paragraphs of dialogue. That’s all it is. He appears in the action for a very, very, very short time, but captures people’s imaginations. It’s an incredibly powerful trick. I wish I knew how to do it: write a 30,000-word book and have enough in it for people to really fall in love with the characters. Yes, though I’ve slightly stretched the rubric of the task that you set me. There’s one line in it about how Harry Lime says that he’s working for the Russians. I’m using that as my justification for calling it an espionage novel: I’m really just trying to get people to read The Third Man . I think people should read it. It’s a great example of how writing, if you’ve got the screen in mind, affects the style of what you’re doing. It’s a series of cinematic set pieces. There’s an incredibly memorable opening image where they bury him, and they have to use pneumatic drills to smash through the frozen ground so they can get his coffin in, because they’re in Vienna, in the middle of winter. There’s also a scene on the famous Ferris wheel in Vienna, the Riesenrad. There’s this sense of the dead of winter hanging over everything. It is. There’s also the echo of what Vienna was, the capital of a much more cosmopolitan, polyglot empire. The characters are all mixtures of German and Hungarian and various other nationalities. It’s a crossroads of Europe. The book is very short, but quite profound—more so than you realize at first glance. It’s really about a sense of divided self. Most of the characters have two different names or different personas. And of course, Vienna is itself a divided city. It’s been literally carved up into four different districts."