The Third Man was a co-production between Alexander Korda's London Films and David O. Selznick, the American producer responsible for Gone with the Wind (US, d. Victor Fleming, 1939) as well as several of Alfred Hitchcock's first American films. Selznick was consulted about the script in the summer of 1948 and coordinated the US release in 1950. His interventions reveal the different perceptions and attitudes prevailing in the US as opposed to the UK.
The situation was difficult to begin with because the film's writer Graham Greene had very mixed feelings about America. Michael Korda (Alex's nephew), in an article for the New Yorker, described Greene's attitude like this: "With the natural anti-Americanism of an upper-class Englishman, he was suspicious of the motives of the United States in the Cold War and resentful of American assumptions of morality."
And Greene's attitude is evident in the novella he wrote as a treatment for The Third Man. The novella's narrator, Colonel Calloway, describes a character called Cooler (who would become a Romanian, Popescu, in the film), a black-marketeer who seems sympathetic at first:
The Englishman who objects to Americans in general usually carries in his mind's eye just such an exception as Cooler: a man with tousled grey hair and a worried kindly face and long-sighted eyes, the kind of humanitarian who turns up in a typhus epidemic or a world war or a Chinese famine long before his countrymen have discovered the place in an atlas.
Greene's tone is scathing here and it seems quite clear that he was just such an Englishman "who objects to Americans in general".
Director Carol Reed seems to have had similar views. A note held in the BFI Special Collections indicates that Reed planned a shot of "a sign saying 'American Information Office', which should look very pompous".
The "American assumptions of morality" referred to by Michael Korda were to loom large in Selznick's mind: in the first instance because of the American censors. In a memo sent to Selznick on 19 August 1948 by Joseph I. Breen, the administrator of the 'Production Code' (Hollywood's system of self-regulation), Breen objects to scenes of drunkenness; to scenes suggesting "an illicit sex relationship between Anna and Harry"; to Holly Martins' shooting of his boyhood friend Harry Lime.
In the finished film there is still plenty of drunkenness. There is no overt reference to sex (as there is in Greene's novella), but in one scene Anna (Alida Valli) is seen in bed in a pair of Harry's monogrammed pyjamas; Holly (Joseph Cotten) does shoot Harry and there is conspicuously a "flavor of either mercy killing or deliberate murder" - precisely what Breen objected to.
It seems that Greene and Reed tended to ignore the more censorious suggestions and instructions coming from their American collaborator. In the novella, both Holly and Harry are British (or half-British in Holly's case). But once American actors - Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles - had been cast, the characters were naturally changed to be Americans and, accidentally, this accentuated the anti-Americanism that was below the surface in Greene's novella: the blundering Holly and the corrupt Harry were now American rather than British.
Moreover, there was nothing in the script that concentrated on American occupying forces in Vienna. Selznick wrote a strongly worded memo on 16 October 1948:
THE SCRIPT IS WRITTEN AS THOUGH ENGLAND WERE THE SOLE OCCUPYING POWER OF VIENNA, WITH SOME RUSSIANS VAGUELY IN THE DISTANCE ... THE ONLY AMERICAN BEING AN OCCASIONAL SOLDIER WHO APPARENTLY IS MERELY PART OF THE BRITISH OCCUPYING FORCE ... I SPENT COUNTLESS HOURS GOING THROUGH WITH REED AND GREENE, AND GETTING AGREEMENT ON, THE TREATMENT OF THE WHOLE BACKGROUND OF VIENNA TODAY ... WE FRANKLY MADE THE RUSSIANS THE HEAVIES, IN PURSUIT OF THE GIRL ALL OF THIS HAS BEEN ELIMINATED, EVEN WHAT WAS IN THE ORIGINAL SCRIPT. WE MUST INSIST UPON ITS RETURN, FOR PATRIOTIC REASONS ... AND FOR PURPOSES OF OUR UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON IN VIENNA ...
But the only concession to Selznick's patriotism in the finished film was to change the racketeer Tyler (the novella's Cooler) into Popescu. One American heavy was eliminated, but there was no sympathetic American added.
But Selznick was not done yet. When it came to releasing The Third Man in the US he changed the film's opening in accordance with his original desire that there be more clarity to the story's background. In the British release version the famous beginning is a voiceover spoken by Reed himself, an enigmatic, unnamed narrator. Selznick had Cotten re-record the voiceover.
This change shifts the tone of the film. In the words of Charles Drazin in his book, In Search of The Third Man:
Now everything is established, and all mystery eliminated, as Holly Martins takes control of his own story. The worldly unknown British voice with a dubious past becomes the known and down-to-earth American one... A startling, offbeat and ironic beginning becomes a humourless and conventional opening to a Hollywood thriller...
In the end, the making of The Third Man is a story of a successful collaboration and Selznick undoubtedly played his part: but there were tensions along the way and significant differences in outlook.
Rob White
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