The Third Man is celebrating its 75th anniversary; to mark the occasion, StudioCanal brought original crew member Angela Allen along for a special screening.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue 52.
It’s not often you get to mark a milestone anniversary of an old black and white film with one of its original crew, particularly not when it’s a 75th anniversary. But that’s what a lucky handful got to do at a special screening of The Third Man as part of a celebration of the post-Second World War, pre-Cold War tale, an unmistakeable British classic.
The film has been restored by StudioCanal, first for a theatrical outing and then for a new Blu-ray and 4K issue of this landmark movie. On hand to talk about the film and its ongoing appeal was Angela Allen, a script supervisor – or continuity girl as it was known in a not-as-enlightened past – not yet out of her teens. She ended up heading to Vienna and working with Orson Welles on what was only her second film.
“I was very young. I’d done my training as a script supervisor as they call us today,” she recalls, “and I’d just done a terrible film about Old Mother Riley, which was horrendous. I thought I’d never work in this business again, because they’d never [let me] do the same thing twice.
“But I got asked to come back to the Korda studios and they put me on the second unit of The Third Man. So I flew out to Vienna. It was my first time abroad; I was 19.”
Vienna was, as in the film, divided up into sectors controlled, variously, by the British, the Americans, the Russians and the French; with the international cast and crew staying in the Astoria Hotel, the only one they could all share.
“Rubble was literally up to the second floor of most of the buildings on the Kärntner Straße,” she says. “It was a very bombed-out city.”
That’s not to say it was in a worse state than back in Blighty. “In some respects we seemed to be able to eat slightly better in Vienna than we did in London, which was still undergoing rations,” she says.
She was one of a handful of teams working on the production.
“There was a sort of Austrian unit that did some odd things, you might say, at the beginning – where you see shots of the real city, that was done by, I think, the Austrian crew. But there were really two units: a night crew and a day crew who were at it.”
Allen was on the second unit, working days, and also spent time in the sewers, the scene of some of the film’s most exciting sequences. “I spent three or four weeks in the sewers, got my badge as a sewer queen. Strangely, there wasn’t a smell. You’d have thought ‘oh my God the sewers’, but it wasn’t like that at all.”
Mind you, Orson Welles famously refused to sully himself below the streets of the Austrian capital.
“I wasn’t there when he made his objection to going down the sewers, but all my friends were,” laughs Allen. “He was called to the set in the sewers and when he arrived he saw all the crew, including the actors Joseph Cotten and Trevor Howard, having a bacon sandwich or whatever they were having and he was so appalled and shocked, he’d never go down the sewers again. So they had to build the sewers at Shepperton Studios in London because he wouldn’t go down again. Everybody else did it. He just refused to go.”
Director Carol Reed was less bothered with such environments, however.
“I’ll always remember, we were doing a shot and Carol came down,” Angela recalls. “There was a spiral staircase leading down to the sewer and there was a waiter with a full long black outfit bearing a silver salver with ‘a cup of coffee for Carol Reed’.”
Welles was not always present for filming, and Allen remembers the reaction to his non-appearances.
“Orson Welles was very hard to find. He’d be in Paris, so they’d send someone to Paris to get him. Then he’d fly to Rome and they’d go to Romeā¦ and he’d go off somewhere else. He was very elusive, because he was actually chasing money for his own films.”
Allen was there for one of his first times in front of camera for the film, however.
“I shot with him on his first day – on the shot he did walking through the Prater [amusement park] on the way to the wheel,” she laughs. “He did a walk forward and a [walk] back and that was him for the day.”
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Welles wasn’t there for his one of his first on-screen appearances in the film – as he’s chased through a dark and shadowy Vienna. Instead it was first assistant director, Guy Hamilton, who stood in for the star.
“Whether he was [as oft-suggested] negotiating his salary or not, Orson Welles was due to be there and didn’t show up. They were shooting and Carol said to Guy, “you’ll have to double it.” So they put a coat hanger in his coat. Guy is the shadow running up the road, because Orson wasn’t there. When Orson did arrive, he was stuck wearing the coat and hat because it had been established. He didn’t have a choice in that matter.”
In a pre-Polaroid world (much of it is now done on tablets and phones), Allen was painstakingly noting everything that happened.
“Part of the script girl’s job was to know exactly which way people were looking when they exit,” she says, “to point out any discrepancies, [as well as to] make sure the clothes always match…”
“It’s a detailed job. You made your note, then you’d type out an extremely detailed description of the shot, showing what the camera lenses were, what they were doing, when the camera moved, every word of dialogue, when someone picked up a plate, which hand it was. They were very detailed notes you’d type up. The Polaroid hadn’t been invented; you had to write everything down.”
Director Carol Reed would pitch in too, with extra details.
“Carol was brilliant at making the shots we had to do in London match with the ones we were doing over there. He was a great technician as well as an artist.”
He appeared to work day and night, thanks to amphetamines.
“Carol Reed was a workaholic. If an actor was involved, whether it was day or night, Carol was always there. I think Carol lived – as we all know – on Benzedrine to keep him going. The rest of the crew weren’t on Benzedrine. People didn’t do drugs in those days. They drank, but they didn’t do drugs.”
Allen also praises director of photography Robert Krasker. “[He] did a brilliant job on the film. You have to attribute a great deal to Robert Krasker because of the look of the film. Nobody could have a better entrance into the film than Orson Welles, with that incredible close-up. He was a brilliant cameraman.”
Little did she know, however, that she’d still be talking about the film 75 years later.
“You always hope when you make a film that it’s going to be a success and it’s going to work out. Sometimes you know it’s a pretty awful script and it’s not going anywhere. But we didn’t know it was going to be something special at all. It was an enormous surprise, including for Carol, that it turned out the way it did.”
The Third Man is out on 4K UHD now.
