Movie Trailers

• Directors: Carol Reed
• Producers: Alexander Korda, David O Selznick
• Writers: Graham Greene
• Genres: Film-Noir, Mystery, Thriller
• Actors: Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles, Trevor Howard

In Austria’s capital city, Vienna, just after the Second World War, when the city is divided into separate zones controlled by the victorious Allied powers – Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union – American pulp western author Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives seeking an old friend, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has offered him the opportunity to work with him in Vienna.

When he arrives at Lime’s apartment, Martins learns that Lime has been recently killed by a lorry while crossing the street. Shocked, he heads to the cemetery to attend Lime’s funeral, where he meets two British military police officers, Sergeant Paine (Bernard Lee), who is an enormous fan of Martins’ books, and his superior, Major Calloway (Trevor Howard). After the services, Calloway gives Martins a lift to his hotel and advises the American to leave Vienna as he can do nothing more than get himself into trouble.

At the hotel, Martins agrees to speak to the members of the local book club at the request of a British cultural official, Crabbin (Wilfrid Hyde-White). He also arranges a meeting with a friend of Lime’s, Baron Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch). Martins meets the man in the Mozart CafГ© to discuss Lime’s death. Kurtz relates that he and Popescu (Siegfried Breuer), another friend of Lime’s, had picked him up and brought him over to the side of the street, where he had asked them to take care of Martins and Anna (Alida Valli), Lime’s actress girlfriend. Kurtz tells Martins which theatre Anna works in, but advises against investigating.

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During the shooting of the film, the final scene was the subject of a dispute between Greene, who wanted the happy ending of the novella, and Selznick and Reed, who stubbornly refused to end the film on what they felt was an artificially happy note. This is one of the few areas where Reed and Selznick did not clash during the production.[citation needed]