In returning to The Third Man on the occasion of its 75th anniverary, it is difficult to resist the pull of Orson Welles – the charismatic enfant terrible that everyone loves to talk about. But it is Carol Reed who most deserves the limelight for a masterpiece of collaborative cinema that was made just before a new generation started to bandy around that troublesome word: auteur.
Reed’s assistant on The Third Man, Guy Hamilton, who can be seen in the background of the photograph above, compared him to the great directors of Hollywood’s golden age – Wyler, Ford, Hawks – who had served apprenticeships in an industrial system of collaborative film-making: “Carol learnt his trade in quota quickies and all the essential tricks that go with it. How to shoot six pages a day. How to lay tracks, stage a scene in one take to get yourself out of trouble and stay on schedule. He was proud of this knowledge and occasionally still used it... Having paid the entrance fee, Carol could now take his time, concentrate, but he was never, never indulgent. ”
By the beginning of the war, with such films as The Stars Look Down (1939) and Night Train to Munich (1940), Reed had established himself among the very best of British directors. But this did not mean much in Hollywood. When Vivien Leigh was shooting Gone With The Wind, she put in a word for Reed with David Selznick, who then asked a minion to inquire about him with his representative in London: “Vivien Leigh tells me she hears great things about a young English director named Carol Reid. I wish you would have Miss Reissar get a line on him, also on what pictures he’s done, and possibly arrange for me to see one or two of them.”
Selznick’s stenographers might not have known yet how to spell Reed’s name, but their boss wasn’t disappointed with the pictures he eventually got to see. And the success of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, which won the Best Film Oscar in 1941, made him wake up even more to the potential of British film-making talent. Some months afterwards, Selznick commented, “The more I see of Reed’s work the more I realise how much more versatile he is than Hitchcock, however much more valuable Hitchcock may be at the present moment.” He tried to sign Reed up and bring him over to Hollywood, but Reed did not want to leave Britain while the country was still at war.
After the war ended, Selznick lost Reed to Sir Alexander Korda, whose inspired decision it was to pair the director with the writer Graham Greene, a partnership that would lead first to a small masterpiece, The Fallen Idol (1948) and then a much bigger (if not necessarily better) masterpiece, The Third Man. As the co-producer of the film, Selznick got a chance at last to work with Reed, and the fact that this notoriously arrogant mogul was prepared to do so even though it meant being Korda’s second fiddle was an index of just how highly he continued to rate him.
Guy Hamilton singled out Reed’s gentle, off-beat humour as one of his great strengths, “looking to make weddings sad, funerals funny, but always with the lightest of touches. He was always very wary of pushing a laugh.” A great example of this quality is the scene in The Third Man when an old balloon-seller enters an empty night-time square. It is funny while at the same time restrained and full of pathos, the lilt of Anton Karas’s zither beautifully bringing out the poetry. But an industrial effort was required to create this moment. Key contributors to the night-time look of the film were dazzling bright arc lights – able to fling the blackest of shadows up on a wall – and the fire brigade, on hand to turn the streets into glistening mirrors.
Reed was uncompromising in his pursuit of whatever he thought was right for a film. So for example, although he suffered from a fear of heights, it did not cause him to ration his use of high-angle shots, which are such a memorable feature of The Third Man. “The camera would go up on top of some rickety rostrums,” remembered Hamilton, “and I would watch Carol force himself up a wooden ladder, across some scaffolding and up another pair of steps to check the set-up. He would descend, covered in sweat and shaking. Very brave.”
After Alexander Korda’s death in 1956, Reed struggled for many years, making several Hollywood films that were marred by studio interference, but the producer John Woolf gave him the kind of support that enabled him, with Oliver!, to win very late in his career the Best Director Oscar that he should really have had for The Third Man.
Unlike Orson Welles, Reed did not like to draw attention to himself. It was the story that came first. The sort of egotism that Welles displayed – so perfect for the part of Harry Lime – would only have got in the way of that. It’s why the best sequence in The Third Man isn’t even in the movie. In my interview with Guy Hamilton for my book In Search of The Third Man, he told me the story of how it came to be left on the cutting-room floor:
Really pictures are made in the cutting-room. There’s no question about that. Most directors leave editing till the picture is complete. Not Carol. He insisted the picture be assembled as it went along, thus being able to gauge performances, eliminate any irritating actor’s tricks from future shooting. If something isn’t clear, don’t reshoot the scene – perhaps in a future one, we can clear up the point, stress something further on. You can only do this if you watch the baby grow and ruthlessly cut out any nasty habits you see it develop.
In The Third Man, there is a sequence and unfortunately I can’t quite remember where it was, but it’s somewhere where the cat goes out of the window, and there are about ten or twenty of the most beautiful shots of Vienna – lit by Krasker – that are magical: the rhythm of the cutting, the photography, the everything. We used to sit looking at the rough cut and say, “You know, you can’t do black-and-white photography better than this.” And the rhythm of one cut to the next is absolute.
Suddenly the lights went up. Carol was white and sweating. He said, “It’s got to go!” We all said, “Never! It’s the best bit.” “You don’t need it, it’s dead footage.” I said, “Carol, maybe storywise it’s dead footage, but it’s just unbelievable. It’s so lovely and beautiful and we spent five months shooting the sodding stuff! Don’t make up your mind now.” “The story demands that you go from A to C, and you don’t need B. B is fabulous, I know, but it goes.”
That’s the best lesson I ever learned: don’t fall in love with your own work. It hurt him, and I’m sure he had sleepless nights, but he knew that you had to go from A to C. Although B was beautiful, fabulous, it had to go into the cutting bin.
Still, it’s a pity that we can’t see A, B and C!
Today they’d call it Director’s Cut.
Yes, exactly.
But it’s bullshit. You make the picture and that’s it.
None the less, it would be nice to see those snippets.
Oh yes, they’re probably lying around somewhere.
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