The Third Man: Viennese Whispers

The tendency of a very famous film like The Third Man is to gather layer upon layer of apocryphal stories so that it becomes increasingly hard with the passing years to unravel what really happened.

So I was pleased a few days ago to hear an intelligent, reasonably accurate discussion of the film on David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast. But a notable lapse was its account of David Selznick, who was the American co-producer of the film.

The show’s guest, Misha Glenny, claimed that Selznick, “wanted to get rid of the zither music”, which received such a rapturous reception when the film was released: “Selznick was quoted as saying, ‘Lose the banjo’.”

I think Glenny probably got that quote from my book In Search of The Third Man, but misremembered who said what. I, in turn, got the original story from Guy Hamilton, who was the assistant director on the film. This is what I wrote in the book:

Guy Hamilton ... remembers being summoned over to the Westrex studio, a state-of-the-art recording theatre at Shepperton. ‘There was a terrible atmosphere. There was a small table. There was Karas sitting on a chair in front of a zither, and the screen. And there was Carol pacing up and down, smoking. He said, “Guy, listen to this. It’s absolute shit.” The Oscar-winning recording team … were sitting behind the console sulking. They played back what Karas had just recorded. And Carol said, “It’s not what we had, what we got in Vienna. It’s not what we had. It’s not what we got on the film.” … What we had in Vienna was Lotte Lenya. Dirty, gritty, and now it was, all of a sudden, perfect … And the soundtrack of The Third Man always made Carol cry because he never got the original dirty, gritty sound.’ 

When, shortly afterwards, the Chairman of British-Lion, Sir Arthur Jarratt, saw the film, he sent Reed a telegram: ‘Dear Carol, saw The Third Man last night. Love it. I think you’ve got a big success there. But please take off the banjo.’ 

Reed showed Guy Hamilton the telegram. ‘They don’t know a fucking thing,’ he said with disgust at the breed of distributors that Sir Arthur Jarratt represented. He screwed up the piece of paper and threw it on the floor. 

Hamilton retrieved the telegram, and, eighteen months later, when both the film and the music had achieved their colossal success, used it to blackmail Jarratt into giving him his first directing job. 

Again referring to Selznick, Glenny commented that “one of the bones of contention was Krasker’s cinematography that Selznick didn’t like, in particular the angles: there are so many shots, which are at an angle; there are very few shots which are straight.”

I have no idea where Glenny heard this particular account, but perhaps its origin lay in an interview that Carol Reed himself gave to the writer Charles Thomas Samuels, which was published in Samuels’ 1972 book Encountering Directors. Asked about the off-angle shots, Reed said, “I remember William Wyler, after seeing the film, made me the gift of a spirit level. “Carol,” he said, “next time you make a picture, just put it on top of the camera, will you!”  

Glenny’s inaccuracies about Selznick’s reaction to the film are very minor compared to the endless myths recycled about the film online. But I think they are worth pointing out, first, as an example of the Chinese whispers (accelerated exponentially by the digital age) that routinely distort how the past is remembered; and secondly, because the documentary evidence shows that, actually, David Selznick was bowled over by the whole picture, as most people still are today.

Selznick saw it for the first time in London on 25 August 1949, just before he set sail for New York on the SS Ile de France. “Have just finished running Third Man,” he cabled one of its stars, Joseph Cotten. “It is in my opinion a really superb picture and you were wonderful in it. Have arranged to take print to America on boat with me.”

Selznick showed the print to preview audiences both on board the Ile de France and then in New York. On 8 September, a few days after the film’s triumphant opening at the Plaza Cinema in London, he then sent one of his notoriously long cables to Jenia Reissar, his representative in London.

I’m reproducing a little bit of that cable here, because I think it is helpful every now and then, in this age of computer-powered fakery, to show how facts are tethered to the evidence on which they rest:

Selznick not only loved the zither music but also played a major part in turning Anton Karas into an international star. Among the papers that can be found in his vast archive at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas is the strategy for the US publicity campaign, which singles out Karas as a major asset to be exploited in selling the picture:

“Francis” was Jack Francis, who looked after publicity in Selznick’s London office. When the memo above was written in September 1949, Karas was back home in Vienna after having spent several weeks with Carol Reed working on the zither soundtrack. But he obviously wasn’t going to be left in peace for very long. In November, he returned to London, where he was for several weeks the star attraction at the Empress Club in Mayfair. Then he was flown over to America to become “the Fourth Man”. This is not a Viennese whisper, but straight from the horse’s mouth.