Anton Karas and the zither behind The Third Man
The instrument behind The Third Man's famous theme is the zither, played by Anton Karas, who composed and performed the film's score. Carol Reed directed the film, with Graham Greene writing its screenplay and Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, and Trevor Howard among its stars. Its setting is Allied-occupied Vienna after World War II, where an American writer arrives expecting work from a friend and instead hears that the friend has died.
Before the production arrived in Vienna, Anton Karas was an unknown performer in local Heurigers. Reed wanted music appropriate to the postwar city and had decided against heavily orchestrated waltzes. Time connected his discovery of the musician with an evening in a Viennese wine garden, where the sound's melancholy fascinated him. Assistant director Guy Hamilton remembered a chance meeting at a party, with the musician playing the zither. Both recollections place the encounter in Vienna and connect Reed's interest to a performance he heard there. The score's beginnings sit among the city's local musicians and social gatherings.
Reed brought Anton Karas to London to develop the score. The musician worked with the director for six weeks and stayed at Reed's house during that period, according to Hamilton. Some filming also used the city's Sievering Studios, before production moved to Worton Hall Studios in Isleworth and Shepperton Studios in Surrey. The film was completed in March 1949. Its music and images thus took shape across a production that moved from Vienna to studio work in Britain.
Holly Martins, played by Cotten, is an American writer of Western pulp novels. Harry Lime, played by Welles, is the childhood friend who has offered him a job. After hearing of Lime's death, Martins meets Anna Schmidt, Lime's girlfriend, and begins asking questions about what happened. The men said to have carried Lime's body become a point of uncertainty when a porter mentions another helper. Major Calloway then reveals Lime's trade in stolen, diluted penicillin, which has injured or killed people. Friendship has brought Martins to Vienna; his investigation takes him into its black market.
Robert Krasker's black-and-white cinematography brings harsh lighting and tilted camera angles to those ruined Vienna locations. The visual style evokes exhaustion and cynicism at the beginning of the Cold War. Contemporary reactions to the tilted images included criticism from C. A. Lejeune in The Observer, who found them distracting. William Wyler sent Reed a spirit level with a joking request to put it on the camera for his next film. William Whitebait in New Statesman and Nation compared the unseen zither player with a Homeric bard using a lyre.
The musical work extended beyond the celebrated theme. Australian-born composer Hubert Clifford wrote additional music under the name Michael Sarsfield. He had served as Musical Director for Korda at London Film Productions, choosing composers, conducting film scores, and composing scores himself. Those duties ran from 1944 until 1950. Meanwhile, the film reached audiences in versions with different beginnings: the original British release used Reed's narration, while the American version substituted Cotten speaking as Martins and removed eleven minutes of footage. The British opening takes a racketeer's view of postwar Vienna; the replacement speaks through the visiting writer.
The theme brought Anton Karas international fame. Released as a single through Decca in Britain and London Records in the United States, it became a best-seller. By November 1949, sales in Britain had reached 300,000, and Princess Margaret was reportedly a fan. Following its American release in 1950, the music spent 11 weeks at the top of Billboard's Best Sellers in Stores chart, from 29 April to 8 July. The composition also circulated under the name Harry Lime Theme, linking its separate musical life to the film's elusive friend.
Later responses placed the score alongside the performances and cinematography that sustained the film's reputation. Roger Ebert praised the fit between the music and the action, framing his appreciation as a question about whether another film had matched them more perfectly. The British Film Institute voted the film the greatest British film of all time in 1999, and a Time Out poll placed it second among British films in 2011. Another part of its music received a later treatment of its own: Rodney Newton orchestrated Clifford's The Casanova Melody in 2000, giving that additional composition a separate orchestral form.