The Third Man [antikvár]

PrefaceThe 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. Most novelists, I suppose, carry round in their heads or in their notebooks the first ideas for stories that have never come to be written. Sometimes one turns them over after many years and thinks regretfully that they would have been good once, in a time now dead. So years back, on the flap of an envelope I had written an opening paragraph: "I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand." I, no more than my hero, had pursued Harry, so when Sir Alexander Korda^ asked me to write a film for Carol Reed - to follow our Fallen Idol -I had nothing more to offer than this paragraph. Though Korda wanted a film about the four-power occupation of Vienna^, he was prepared to let me pursue the tracks of Harry Lime.