In a sense THE THIRD MAN really is an adaption. I happen to
have the book - an old Pan paperback from the fifties - and
it contains a preface by Mr. Greene himself. It turns out he
was approached to script a movie about occupied Vienna., and
all he had at the time was this idea for a story where a man
sees in a crowd a friend whose burial he had attended the
previous week. He then set about to flesh it out. However,
not in the normal way. To quote from the preface:
"To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without
first writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot,
on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and
atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible in to
capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script.
One can reproduce an effect caught in another medium, but one
cannot make the first act of creation in script form. One
must have the sense of more material than one need to draw
on. THE THIRD MAN, therefore, though never intended for
publication, had to start as a story before those apparently
interminable transformations from one treatment to
another."
So, the story actually preceded the script, although it was
not published until after the movie came out. And the story
itself went through many changes before the script was
finished. And as the author himself put it:
"The film, in fact, is better than the story because it is in
this case the finished story."
Oh, and the dialogue about Swiss cuckoo clocks was provided
by Orson Welles himself.
From:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com [mailto:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of William Ahearn
Sent: den 29 juni 2007 19:03 To:
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: RARA-AVIS:
Schulberg
--- Juri Nummelin <
juri.nummelin@pp.inet.fi
<mailto:juri.nummelin%40pp.inet.fi> > wrote:
> (What bothers me all the time is that
> many people
> seem to think that THE THIRD MAN, the film, is
a
> version of the
> book. It's also a novelization from Greene's
own
> script.
Granted. But it's one of my favorite flicks so I'm doing a
piece on The Gun For Hire and working The Third Man and The
Comedians into the essay if I can find The Comedians. OK,
maybe it's cheating but nobody's keeping score.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 29 Jun 2007 EDT