The Third Man by Graham Greene

Saturday-Night Theatre:

The Third Man by Graham Greene
Adapted from the screenplay by Richard Wortley
Sat 13th Nov 1971, 20:30 on BBC Radio 4 FM

Rollo Martins, writer of Westerns, is invited to Vienna to join his friend Harry Lime on a new enterprise.

He is unpleasantly surprised both by the enterprise and by the news that his friend is dead.
Producer: Richard Wortley

Rollo Martins: Edward Bishop
Harry Lime: Ian Hendry
Colonel Calloway: John Bentley
Anna: Ann Lynn
Harry Lime's porter: William Fox
Sgt Paine: Henry Stamper
Dr Winkelf: Henry Stamper
Tombs: Geoffrey Beevers
Carter: Leslie Heritage
Kurtz: Denis McCarthy
Tyler: Peter Marinker
Hansl: Olwen Griffiths
Austrian woman: Olwen Griffiths
German hotel porter: John Samson

Rollo Martins' usual line is the writing of cheap paperback Westerns under the name of Buck Dexter. But when his old friend Harry Lime invites him to Vienna, he jumps at the chance. With exactly five pounds in his pocket, he arrives only just in time to make it to his friend's funeral. The victim of an apparently banal street accident, the late Mr. Lime, it seems, had been the focus of a criminal investigation, suspected of nothing less than being "the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living in this city." Martins is determined to clear his friend's name, and begins an investigation of his own...

The Third Man
BY GRAHAM GREENE

RELEASE DATE: JUNE 15, 1950
The story for the motion picture which has had a sensationally successful critical and popular reception, this although it may not be as "finished" (the author) as the film for which it was written, is still a highly effective experience in suspense. Against the backdrop of the strangely, silent streets of postwar Vienna, this follows the search for the third man said to have witnessed the death of Harry Lime as it is undertaken by Rollo Martins, Lime's friend of twenty years, a rather fatuous and adolescent American. And as the inquiry leads from those who know Harry to the girl who loved him, to the folio of a man from Scotland Yard, the climax is reached with the resurrection of the dead man and a stalk through the sewers of the city. The case here, the use of occasional characterization, the unrelieved and undeviating tension demonstrate again a mastery of this medium.

[Kirkus Reviews]
'The Third Man' as a Story and a Film
By GRAHAM GREENE

"The Third Man" was never written to be read but only to be seen. Like many love affairs, it started at a dinner table and continued with many headaches in many places, Vienna, Venice, Ravello, London, Santa Monica. . . .

[NEW YORK TIMES March 19, 1950]

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