{"id":1378,"date":"2013-05-10T09:00:54","date_gmt":"2013-05-10T09:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/?p=1378"},"modified":"2025-06-10T12:32:35","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T12:32:35","slug":"will-the-real-vienna-please-stand-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/will-the-real-vienna-please-stand-up","title":{"rendered":"Will \u201cthe real Vienna\u201d please stand up?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anne Marie Scholz’s\u00a0From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events<\/em><\/a> was published by Berghahn Books in April 2013. In what follows, Scholz discusses the experience of touring Vienna and seeing parts of the city made famous by\u00a0The Third Man.\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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The still on the cover of my book\u2014from the 1949 British\/U.S. co-production The Third Man<\/i>–depicts the American Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten). He\u2019s had a few too many drinks, and has just seen his old friend Harry Lime\u2014a friend he believed dead\u2014 disappear somewhere on the square \u201cAm Hof\u201d in post-WWII Vienna. He is torn between doubts over his own sanity, unrequited love for Lime\u2019s Czech girlfriend Anna, relief that his friend may still be alive, and near certainty that Harry is mixed up in a vicious black market racket. The darkness and mysterious aura of the Vienna square reinforces the haunted expression on Holly\u2019s face. His predicament\u2014that of an enterprising but unwelcome American pulp fiction writer stumbling through the labyrinth of postwar Europe–is inextricably linked with the city where he finds himself.<\/p>\n

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Holly\u2019s search for his friend in the streets and sewers of Vienna still fascinates today. \u201cThe Third Man Tour\u201d of the major sites of the film is among the most popular attractions in Vienna, and the film is still screened regularly in local theatres. I went on this tour in 1999, the fiftieth anniversary of the film. What struck me was the contrast between the \u201creal Vienna\u201d of the film, and the \u201creal Vienna\u201d on the tour. Here were some of the historic location sites, clearly recognizable if not entirely unchanged after half a century, and yet they were so different from what I\u2019d seen in the film that I began to wonder\u2014if they\u2019d filmed\u00a0The Third Man<\/i>\u00a0in a Hollywood studio, would the contrast have seemed any starker?<\/p>\n

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Photo courtesy Johannes Innerhofer<\/p>\n

If we compare the film still on the book cover with a recent photo of\u00a0 \u201cAm Hof\u201d, we can see the contrast. The buildings in the background look familiar, as they are centuries old, but the 1949 film added its own props, the angel and the fountain; moreover, in the \u201creal\u201d Vienna there was never a kiosk as we see it over Holly Martins\u2019s shoulder, and thus no entrance to the sewer system.\u00a0 The kiosk was a prop strategically placed so as to hide the \u201creal\u201d statue in the background, the \u201cMariens\u00e4ule\u201d (Mary\u2019s Pillar) erected in the late seventeenth century.<\/p>\n

What to do with this contrast? It made little sense to condemn one or the other version as false, or \u201cless original\u201d than the other. The technical explanations of the filmmaking process shed some light, of course: lighting, perspective, props, actors etc., transform \u201creality\u201d into fiction. Yet what was it that gave me the uncanny feeling the film had actually been more \u201creal\u201d than the place I was looking at on the tour?<\/p>\n

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I sought some answers to this question by looking at the ways The Third Man <\/i>was received by audiences and critics during the early Cold War, as well as in the relationship between Graham Greene\u2019s versions of the story and the film itself. Film publicity in Germany, for example, claimed The Third Man<\/i> was \u2018much more\u2019 than just a film\u2014it had \u2018captured\u2019 the \u2018reality\u2019 of the postwar world. In my explorations of the historical dimensions of the film\u2019s literary \u201cpredecessor\u201d and its reception, I discovered that one important aspect of this postwar reality had to do with the marked ambivalence of\u00a0 Europeans toward the influence and presence of American popular culture. This quality is reflected, ironically, in the American Holly Martin\u2019s expression as he ponders whether he should catch the next plane out of Vienna before he finds out more than he wants to know. His face, framed by the dark Vienna square, mirrors his own disappointed expectations as well as those of European audiences, \u00a0who were both mesmerized by and deeply suspicious of America\u2019s role in postwar Europe.<\/p>\n

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Today, films such as The Third Man<\/i>, and other movies I discuss in the book, enjoy a reputation as \u201cfilm classics\u201d, as textbook examples of a certain style of filmmaking.\u00a0 For film buffs who know these movies well, a closer look at the transnational historical dynamics that went into their production and reception will shed new light on old favorites. For a younger generation of film and media viewers, used to very different visual styles and practices, \u00a0a historical perspective on both classic and more contemporary adaptations can make palpable how moving images of stories of the past intrigued audiences, and provide a jumping off point for understanding present day negotiations between media and story-telling as more than just fodder for the global media canon. Perhaps they too– if read carefully–are \u2018capturing the reality\u2019 of our post Cold War world.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Anne-Marie Scholz<\/strong>\u00a0holds a teaching affiliation with the University of Bremen, Germany and is currently an Adjunct Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz. She is also a freelance language teacher and translator. She has published in\u00a0The European Journal of American Studies, Film and History, Amerikastudien\/American Studies<\/em>, and\u00a0German History<\/em>\u00a0and has taught at the Universities of Bonn, Hamburg, T\u00fcbingen, Bremen, and the University of California, Irvine.<\/p>\n

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Anne Marie Scholz’s\u00a0From Fidelity to History: Film Adaptations as Cultural Events was published by Berghahn Books in April 2013. In what follows, Scholz discusses the experience of touring Vienna and seeing parts of the city made famous by\u00a0The Third Man.\u00a0 _____________________________ The still on the cover of my book\u2014from the 1949 British\/U.S. co-production The Third… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,200],"tags":[299,1665,135,111,177,1763,183,238],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1378"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1512,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1378\/revisions\/1512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berghahnbooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}