The Third Man

The Third Man was never written to be read but only to be watched, and like all love affairs, it began around a dinner table and continued, with headaches, in many places, Vienna and Venice, Ravello and London and Santa Monica.
I think most novelists carry in their heads or in their notebooks the first ideas of stories that will never be written. Sometimes one of them turns these ideas over in his mind many years later, and thinks with regret that they would have been good stories once, but are dead now. And so I wrote on the fold of an envelope, years ago, with an opening paragraph: I said my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, and I saw him go without believing it, without a sign of identification among the crowd of strangers on the Strand. I had not pursued Harry any more than my hero pursued him, so I had nothing more to offer than this paragraph to Sir Alexander Korda when he asked me to write a film for Carol Reed to follow our fallen idol. Although Korda wanted a film about the Four Powers occupying Vienna, he was willing to let me follow Harry Lime’s trail.