![The Third Man: A Zither Player Found In A Wine Gar](https://cdn.slatesource.com/6/a/7/6a7a0ab8-b8c6-402e-85c2-1457f7b27d7a.webp)

# The Third Man: A Zither Player Found In A Wine Gar

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/@steph/the-third-man-a-zither-player-found-in-a-wine-gar)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/@steph)
- Created on Oct 1, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/6/a/7/6a7a0ab8-b8c6-402e-85c2-1457f7b27d7a.webp)

## The Third Man (1949)

Carol Reed heard a musician in a Vienna heuriger and scrapped the idea of an orchestral score entirely.

Runtime

104 minutes

Director

Carol Reed

Country

United Kingdom

Award

BAFTA Award for Best British Film

Cinematography

Robert Krasker

> In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

## 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.

journey·6 Movements

# Watching The Third Man

Intensity

/

Movement

The Funeral

Late

"A writer arrives in occupied Vienna to take a job and is told at the graveside that the man offering it died on Tuesday."

Anton Karas was playing zither in a Vienna wine garden when Reed heard him. His theme spent eleven weeks at number one in the American charts in 1950 and the film has no other music at all.

Welles wrote his own cuckoo clock line and initially refused to film in the sewers, so some of the pursuit is a double in Vienna and some is Welles on a set in London.

[The Third Man on IMDb: full cast and crew](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041959/?utm_source=slatesource)