11/24/2023 0 Comments Vienna waits for you movie wikiThe book was written (or at least published) after the screenplay he produced for the film by the same name (1949, directed by Carol Reed, featuring Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles). Graham Greene to my mind somewhat stuffily separated his narrative books for much of his career into two categories-fiction and “entertainments”-such as this noir novel, The Third Man. Stills from the movie: Top from middle from It's a British film from 1949 starring Joseph Cotten. I have not seen the movie but I imagine it could be good because it’s a simple but good plot. I’ll give it a ‘4’ for a thriller and a ‘3’ for its literary value. Not something memorable by Greene, known for more serious work. Another thread is that Rollo start to fall in love with his friend’s woman.Ī decent story and a quick read. One of the witnesses gets murdered and Martins knows he’s on to something.Ī side story, which is kind of a pun for the author, is that Buck Dexter (the main character’s pen name) is scheduled to speak at book clubs in Vienna about “the Christian novel.” Greene is having fun with us because as an author he was considered by many to be a “Catholic novelist,” although he did not consider himself one. His suspicion centers on a “third man” at the accident scene, who somehow disappeared because only one witness swears he saw him. The more he finds out from police reports and witnesses and from the dead man’s woman friend, the more suspicious he becomes. The main character is suspicious so he starts his own investigation. His good friend from schooldays was struck and killed by an automobile. It’s Vienna right after WW II so we still have bombed out buildings and streets blocked with rubble. He calls him Rollo when he says or does something stupid otherwise he’s Martins. I liked the way the author alternates use of the main character’s name. Lime, it seems, had been the focus of a criminal investigation, suspected of nothing less than being "the worst racketeer who ever made a dirty living in this city." Martins is determined to clear his friend's name, and begins an investigation of his own. The victim of an apparently banal street accident, the late Mr. With exactly five pounds in his pocket, he arrives only just in time to make it to his friend's funeral. But when his old friend Harry Lime invites him to Vienna, he jumps at the chance. Rollo Martins' usual line is the writing of cheap paperback Westerns under the name of Buck Dexter. The GR blurb from the book gives a good summary without giving away plot so I will use that: It's a decent story, I guess I’d call it a thriller. In fact, in the preface he tells us it “was never intended for publication” and “The film, in fact, is better than the story…” LOL I guess you can say these things when you are an accomplished author and you know that you have an automatic audience that will read your stuff. Now Third Man comes along and it turns out that Graham Greene wrote this initially as a film script and re-wrote it as a novella after the movie came out. I just finished reviewing Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, a film script. First a coincidence: I don’t usually read film scripts or plays but this is the second book in a row I have read not realizing ahead of time that they were in effect film scripts.
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