Week 9 Guide: Sun-Mon Viewing Assignment
Reed's movie contains a great deal of dialogue in German, far more "foreign language" content than Curtiz' Casablanca. Some passages are translated by characters in the film, mainly because Holly Martins knows almost no German (one of the movie's important points). Other passages can be found in the script and notes to the script reprinted in The third man: a film, by Graham Greene and Carol Reed), on Reserve at the library. You will quickly see that knowing, and not knowing another language, is of immense importance to this movie's plot. Keep that in mind when you consider that The Third Man was immensely popular in its American release, so all that German didn't offend audiences in the 1950s. Why not? Could this be a thematic issue for the film maker? Click here for the cast members and the names of the parts they played.