I half expected to see Welles run towards me

Harry Mount celebrates the 60th anniversary of Carol Reed’s masterly film The Third Man with a tour of Harry Lime’s postwar Vienna — the true star of the movie

Vienna

Six times a week, the Burg Kino cinema in Vienna shows The Third Man in its small Studio Theatre. ‘It’s best that you book,’ said the polite young man behind the counter in perfect English, when I came along in the morning to see if there were any tickets for the 10.45 p.m. show on Friday night. ‘We sometimes get tour parties and the place is packed out.’

I needn’t have booked after all. Though I was there in honour of The Third Man’s birthday — it’s been 60 years since Carol Reed built his masterly vision out of Graham Greene’s screenplay — the only people in the audience were me, two teenage girls — one in a lilac puffer jacket, another with lurid ginger hair — and two male loners who showed every sign of being regulars. Armed with popcorn, each marched purposefully to a favourite seat (one on either side of the auditorium) just as the film opened to Reed’s voiceover — ‘I never knew the old Vienna, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm…’.

It’s not hard to see how you could become an obsessive Burg Kino pilgrim. I’ve seen the film half a dozen times in London, but I’ve only now realised that its real star is Vienna — the Prater Wheel and its elegant Victorian carriages, the cobbled streets sprayed with water by Reed to give greater reflected light on celluloid.

I began humming Anton Karas’s zither music to myself as I tramped around the city; heard the ringing gunshots in Vienna’s sewers. The shadow of Harry Lime danced across Michaelerplatz.

Vienna is so much the star that at a dinner in the city’s MAK modern art museum the night before, a young doctor said to me, ‘We never watch The Sound of Music, but we love the Third Man.’