A City In Four Zones

Graham Greene wrote it as a story first and a screenplay second, and the setting does most of the work: Vienna in 1948, bombed flat, divided between four occupying powers, patrolled by joint military police who cannot agree on jurisdiction. An American pulp novelist arrives to take a job from an old friend and finds a funeral instead. What follows is a detective story in which the detective is the least competent person on screen, run through streets shot at deliberately wrong angles by Robert Krasker, whose tilted frames and wet cobblestones won the film its only Oscar. Orson Welles appears for roughly ten minutes, gets the best entrance in cinema and the best speech, and then gets chased through the sewers by everyone he has poisoned.