One Man Searching for the Third Man by Ben Mallalieu

I was loitering in the doorway of Schreyvogelgasse 8 when a middle-aged Austrian couple walked past looking puzzled and slightly annoyed, as though they sensed there was a private joke going on from which they had been excluded. They had seen this before: Beethoven lived round the corner, but his house rarely attracts visitors, yet often as they walk past this otherwise unremarkable house they find a foreign tourist standing in the doorway.

For many non-Austrians, it is the most famous doorway in Vienna: a man in an overcoat hidden in the shadows, a cat at his feet, streetlights shining on wet cobblestones. Joseph Cotton stood just over there by the corner and shouted: “Come out, come out whoever you are! What’s the matter satchelfoot, cat got your tongue?” And then a woman opened a curtain in the building opposite and Anton Karas played the Harry Lime Theme.

Cotton plays an unsuccessful writer called Holly Martins, who has been offered a job by a childhood friend, Harry Lime. Arriving in Vienna, he learns that Lime had recently been killed in mysterious circumstances. Then one night in Schreyvogelgasse, he sees him standing in a doorway.

“I didn’t know the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm . . .” Within a few years, almost before the film was released, the old Vienna and the easy charm were back as though nothing had happened, the rubble and the undignified ruins cleared away, and it would have been hard to picture Sacher’s Hotel as a transit hotel for English officers (no Austrians allowed) or Kärtnerstrasse as a ruin, existing only to the first storey, if at all.

For most Viennese, the war and its aftermath were officially forgotten, never mentioned, nor taught in schools other than a few dates and vague suggestions that Austria had been occupied by the Germans against its will. As one might expect, The Third Man bombed at the Austrian box office every bit as badly as The Sound Of Music would a generation later.

The easy charm and the old Vienna are still there, and although a new Starbucks has opened opposite Sacher’s, you can still find shabby cafes with surly waiters where you can read the papers all morning over one coffee and a glass of water. And there are still more over-the-top baroque statues than any city on earth.

But Strauss has dropped down the charts. Understandably in his 250th anniversary year, Mozart is the main attraction — you can even buy Mozart golf balls. Klimt and Schiele are big, Freud less so. And nearly 60 years late, The Third Man is slowly becoming something the city can take pride in. The Burgkino cinema shows the film three times a week, and a small Third Man museum has recently opened displaying such relics as the actual cap worn by the small boy and the zither (authenticated by the cigarette burns) played by Anton Karas in the opening credits.

In the museum, you can play any of 330 cover versions of the Harry Lime Theme, none of them an improvement on the original, including two unreleased recordings by the Beatles and others by the likes of Liberace, Russ Conway and the Shadows, all surprisingly recognisable. Worst of all, and on it own worth the price of admission, is one from Hawaiian Guitar Hits by Roy Smeck and his Paradise Serenaders.

I missed the a capella version — I was in the sewer at the time. Not, unfortunately, the real one — closed due to construction work — but a mock up in a backroom of the museum with a very convincing smell.

You can go on Third Man tours of the city led by the museum’s curator, Gerhard Strassgschwandtner, who is everything a guide should be — intelligent, funny, enthusiastic and knowledgeable. And no other film of that time would make so rewarding a location tour. You certainly wouldn’t see anything you’d recognise of Casablanca.

For complicated financial reasons, as much as 40% of The Third Man was shot on location, almost unheard of in the days of studio pictures, and it is possibly the most complete record of how the city looked immediately after the war.

The film is an odd mixture of realism, fable, expressionism and documentary. The Austrian characters are played by Austrians and speak German without subtitles. But the lighting and the shadows aren’t real. The woman opening the curtains could never have lit up Lime’s face with the force of a 50kW spotlight.

The plot just about works as a thriller, but on repeated viewing it becomes more of a Heart of Darkness for the physically and morally damaged post-war Europe. The sewers (“Runs straight into the blue Danube, Sir. Smells sweet, doesn’t it”) become a metaphor for corruption, the criminal underworld and ultimately a Dante-esque circle of hell.

The streets of Vienna are not so empty as they were in 1948, no one sells ersatz coffee, not even Starbucks, and there isn’t a fuel shortage. In no other film, not even Scott of the Antarctic, have people looked so cold; the concierge of Anna’s dilapidated apartment block permanently wrapped in an eiderdown, everyone wearing overcoats indoors, even the hookers in the nightclub.

But you can still ride the wheel. Sixty years ago, it revolved slowly above broken merry-go-rounds and smashed tanks. Now it revolves equally incongruously above hi-tech, white-knuckle rides, but the carriages look just as they did in the film. You can still count the dots, deciding how many you can afford to spend — “free of income tax, old boy. It’s the only way to save money these days.” But you can’t open the doors in mid circle; you probably never could. There are no Third Man mementoes on sale in the new gift shop, not even a cuckoo clock.

You can walk the walk from the famous last scene. “It was February, and the gravediggers had been forced to use pneumatic drills to open the frozen ground in Vienna’s Central Cemetery. It was as if even nature was doing its best to reject Lime . . .” The avenues still stretch out like the spokes of a giant wheel. Gravestones don’t change much.

A shorter version of this article first appeared on Guardian Unlimited.