The third man (novel)
The third man (original title The Third Man ) is a novel by Graham Greene . The 1949 film of the same name was created as a collaboration between Carol Reed and Alexander Korda after Graham Greene created a narrative as the basis for it. It was first published in 1950 in its original form and as a novella.
action
The western author Rollo Martins is invited to Vienna by his friend Harry Lime . When Martins arrives, he learns that Lime was killed in a traffic accident. He begins his own research, and soon notices that almost everyone involved in the accident was Harry Lime's acquaintance. Only one resident, Mr. Koch, heard something of the action; he innocently reports about a "third man", another person involved in the accident unknown to the police, and is then murdered.
During his research, Martins also met Anna Schmidt, Lime's partner, who made her way as an actress. Martins falls in love with her, but she still clings to Harry. Since she actually comes from Hungary (in the film: Czechoslovakia ) and lives in Vienna with forged papers, the Soviet occupying power is after her. In the novel, the Soviet military police even attempted to kidnap Anna into her zone (as Greene himself writes: a not uncommon occurrence in Vienna at the time). This scene was dropped for the film because Reed was afraid it might be misunderstood as a propaganda film .
When Martins is followed at night, he has to discover that his pursuer is Harry Lime, who was believed to be dead. The British Major Calloway then initiated him into the crimes Lime was accused of: trafficking in stolen penicillin , which was diluted with colored water or sand to increase profit margins and thus not only became unusable, but also in a case in a children's clinic As a result, when meningitis was treated, some children died while some went mad.
Martins makes himself available to the police as a decoy to guide his friend from the Russian-occupied part of Vienna, where he usually resides (since the Soviet military police are not exactly cooperative with the MPs of the other occupiers, and he can therefore hide) in the To lure zones of the western powers. An appointment in a coffee house follows, as well as a chase through the ramified (and all four sectors of Vienna ) canal system in which Lime is shot and, trapped in an exit shaft, is shot by Martins.
Emergence
As Greene writes in the preface to his novel The Third Man , it was "written not to be read, but to be seen". Alexander Korda asked Greene if he could write a script for Carol Reed after they shared Little Hearts in Need , and Greene only had a first paragraph to offer at the moment, which he had noted on an envelope years earlier: “A week ago I said goodbye to Harry as his coffin was lowered into the frozen earth in February. So I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw him rushing past me in the crowd of the 'Strand' without a sign of recognition. ”Korda accepted the idea, only asked for the move to post-war Vienna under the government of the four victorious powers.
Greene's way of working required that a material first had to be worked out as a narrative before he could create a script from it. On this basis, he then created the film script together and exclusively with Carol Reed. Greene: “'The Third Man', however, should never be more than the raw material for a film. The reader will notice numerous discrepancies between the story and the film, but should not believe that these conversions were forced upon a reluctant writer; they may as well have been suggested by this author himself. And the film is actually better than the original narrative because in this particular case it is the final version of the narrative. "
Only a few scenes were slightly changed for the film, the story remained basically unchanged. The "silly first name" (Greene) Rollo was replaced for the film by the more American Holly, and details of some of the secondary characters were adapted to the actors. Out of consideration for the American public, the American criminal Cooler was changed to the Romanian Popescu.
bibliography
- Graham Greene: The Third Man and the Fallen Idol . Novel. William Heinemann, London 1950.
- German edition: The Third Man and Little Heart in Need . German by Fritz Burger. Artemisverlag, Zurich 1951 (many different editions of this translation appeared up to 1994 - with and without the story Little Heart in Need - in a wide variety of publishers. In 1994, as part of the new translations of many of Greene's works, the transfer of Fritz Burger by Käthe Springer was revised. )
- New translation by Nikolaus Stingl , with an afterword by Hans Zischler . Zsolnay, Vienna 2016.
- Illustrated version, Edition Büchergilde, Frankfurt am Main 2017.
