John Arends at 2014-08-14 12:25:04:

"I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm. Constantinople suited me better. [Scenes of black market goods changing hands] I really got to know it in the classic period of the black market. We'd run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. Of course a situation like that does tempt amateurs... [Dead body seen floating in the river] …but, well, you know, they can't stay the course like a professional. Now the city is divided into four zones, you know, each occupied by a power: the American, the British, the Russian and the French. But the centre of the city that's international policed by an international patrol. One member of each of the four powers. Wonderful! What a hope they had! All strangers to the place and none of them could speak the same language. Except a sort of smattering of German. Good fellows on the whole, did their best you know. Vienna doesn't really look any worse than a lot of other European cities. Bombed about a bit. Oh, I was going to tell you, wait, I was going to tell you about Holly Martins, an American. Came all the way here to visit a friend of his. The name was Lime, Harry Lime. Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him, some sort, I don't know, some sort of job. Anyway, there he was, poor chap. Happy as a lark and without a cent." -- The Third Man (1949) screenplay by Graham Greene, novella by Graham Greene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbfKibLRqqQ Trivia: The American version of the film opens with a voice-over narration in which the character "Holly Martins" explains that post-war Vienna is divided into four zones: American, British, Russian and French. In the British version of the film, the opening voice-over is delivered by a British narrator, whom modern sources identify as producer-director Carol Reed. Ranked #57 on the AFI's "100 Years 100 Movies" list, "The Third Man" features one of Orson Welles' greatest performances as an actor. In Graham Greene's novella, which was published after the film's release, the three male protagonists were British. In his preface to the novella, Greene maintains that the story was never intended for publication, but was written expressly as a blueprint for the screenplay. "To me it is almost impossible to write a film without first writing a story," he wrote. "One must have the sense of more material than one needs to draw on." Greene adds that Welles wrote the well-known line about Switzerland's sole contribution to world culture being the cuckoo clock. Dialogue on Dialogue: This opening voiceover far exceeds its basic functions of setting the stage, outlining the fractured politics and introducing the two key characters. Visually, aurally (with Anton Kara's zither-filled music) and especially verbally, it sets the cavalier, untrustworthy tone of the story, as it slides us into the bent, lethal world of the black market in post-war Vienna.