Harry Lime
Harry Lime is the title character in the British film The Third Man (1949, directed by Carol Reed ). The writer Graham Greene wrote the screenplay and later published a novel of the same name based on it . Due to the success of the film, radio and television series around the character Harry Lime were subsequently produced.
Harry Lime in the 1949 film The Third Man
The location of the film is the divided city of Vienna after the Second World War , where the American Harry Lime ( Orson Welles ), head of a gang of pushers on the black market for penicillin , moves through the urban sewer system in the allied sectors .
Harry Lime, the actual main character, about whose mysterious and, as it turns out, simulated death, the plot of the first half of the film revolves, only appears after a full hour of film running time. Comparable works for the dramaturgical process of introducing a central figure late and thus increasing its effect are e.g. B. Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897) or Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness (1899).
A significant moment in the film is the limit performance at the ferris wheel of Vienna Prater , where he developed his famous improvised by Welles' cuckoo clock keeps speech ":
“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. "
“In the 30 years under the Borgias there was only war, terror, murder and bloodshed, but there was Michelangelo , Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance . In Switzerland there was brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace. And what do we get from it? The cuckoo clock ! "
In addition to the enormous success of the film, Anton Karas ' zither music , in particular the " Harry Lime theme ", contributed to the popularity of the character Harry Lime. Although Lime was shot in the finale by his friend Holly Martins ( Joseph Cotten ), he was "revived" for subsequent dramatic adaptations.
Radio plays from the 1950s
In 1951 the Lux Radio Theater of the American radio station CBS broadcast a one-hour radio play version of The Third Man . Ted de Corsia spoke the role of Harry Lime and repeated it on another broadcast that year.
In 1951–52 the British BBC broadcast a series of radio plays entitled The Adventures of Harry Lime, produced by Harry Alan Towers . However, only 16 of the original 52 episodes were broadcast. Orson Welles repeated his role as Harry Lime, which although still a criminal, was laid out more easily than the role model. The Limes adventures told in the episodes preceded the movie (“ prequel ”). In the USA all episodes of the series ran between 1951 and 1953 under the title The Lives of Harry Lime .
Individual episodes such as A Ticket to Tangier , The Dead Candidate , Man of Mystery , Murder on the Riviera and Blackmail is a Nasty Word are still particularly popular these days . A Ticket to Tangier is a radio play adaptation of the films of the black series , The Dead Candidate, an exaggerated burlesque , whose plot , set in a fictional banana republic , Welles later processed in his novel Une große légume (1953). Motifs from Man of Mystery were later used in Welles' classic film Mr. Arkadin / Mr. Satan himself (1955).
Harry Lime as a television character
From 1959 the BBC produced a television series in which the English actor Michael Rennie embodied the art dealer Harry Lime, who apart from the name, the entrapment accompanied by the music of Anton Karas in an expressionist Vienna setting and the "larmory cooleness" of Harry Lime had more in common with Greene's figure. The series ran on British television until 1965. While only 73 episodes were broadcast in the UK, the US television network NBC aired all 77 episodes. The series had been produced with the American market in mind from the start: a large part of the filming took place in the 20th Century Fox studios in California .
Aftermath
In the horror film The Horror Alligator from 1980, the last shot in the Chicago sewer system shows the graffito "Harry Lime lives" on the wall. In the movie Kevin - Home Alone (1990) there is a character named Harry Lime, played by Joe Pesci . The American rock band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club released the album Take Them On, On Your Own in 2003 , the black and white cover of which shows three dark people in front of a brightly lit entrance to a canal, with this album cover paying homage to the film The Third Man .
Web links
- Overview of the 52 episodes of The Lives of Harry Lime on Wellesnet.com
- Audio recordings of The Lives of Harry Lime on Archive.org
Individual evidence
- ↑ Interview with Graham Greene at a Guardian and National Film Theater event , 1984.
- ↑ Quoted from the German cinema dubbing of 1963.