I must have seen The Third Man a few times. What I like most about it is portrayal of Europe after WWII. And its darkness.
John Gray, August 10 2012:
""In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
When Orson Welles spoke these lines as Harry Lime, the charismatic villain at the heart of the film The Third Man, released in 1949, Welles can't have realised how they would resonate ever after. Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay, credited the lines to Welles, and it seems clear the actor added them when some extra dialogue was needed while the film was being shot.
The lines became lodged in the mind because they encapsulated an uncomfortable and at the same time compelling idea. His history may not have been factually accurate - the Swiss were a major military power in Renaissance times and the cuckoo clock originated some time later in Bavaria - but the idea that culture thrives in conditions of war and tyranny has an undeniable basis in fact..."
What could be the ultimate source of the cuckoo clock line?
"...The likeliest source is the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In a lecture on art from 1885 (published in Mr Whistler's "Ten O'Clock" [1888]), he said "The Swiss in their mountains ... What more worthy people! ... yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!" In a 1916 reminiscence,[29] American painter Theodore Wores said that he "tried to get an acknowledgment from Whistler that San Francisco would some day become a great art center on account of our climatic, scenic and other advantages. 'But environment does not lead to a production of art,' Whistler retorted. 'Consider Switzerland. There the people have everything in the form of natural advantages—mountains, valleys and blue sky. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock!"..."
