“Holly, I’d like to cut you in, old man. There’s nobody left in Vienna I can really trust, and we’ve always done everything together. When you make up your mind, send me a message – I’ll meet you any place, any time, and when we do meet old man, it’s you I want to see, not the police. Remember that, won’t ya? Don’t be so gloomy.
After all it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.”
Orson Welles has been a giant of the film industry since he first stepped foot in it with his masterpiece Citizen Kane. He has been lauded as one of the greatest filmmakers and his innovation in the techniques of filmmaking continues to influence past, present and future filmmakers.
Yet, he wasn’t just a great director but a great writer and producer. He was also a great actor both on-screen, and previously, on stage where he honed his craft. He has had some memorable moments in all the films he’s acted in (even his final film which was the cult classic animated film feature Transformers: The Movie, where he was the voice of a planet-devouring transforming robot planetoid).
It is his brief but great monologue past the halfway mark of the classic noir film The Third Man that is my choice for Scenes I Love and another entry in the “Great Film and TV Monologues” series.
Welles plays the amoral Harry Lime who meets up with his childhood friend Holly Martins. As they ride the famous Wiener Riesenrad in Vienna, Welles waxes poetic about the insignificance of people, in general. How, from the the heights of the Riesenrad, people looked like little dots and would one dot or a group of them be missed if they suddenly stopped moving.
Yet, it is when Lime and Martins exit the ride that Welles’ as Harry Lime performs what is considered one of the greatest monologues ever put on film and, most likely, one of the briefest. It is a philosophical observation on the cynics take on the violent nature of man and how it affects society.
The monologue itself wasn’t written by the film’s writer, Graham Greene, but was inserted in the script by Orson Welles himself. The Third Man was one of the greatest films ever produced even without Welles’ contribution as a writer, but we should be all glad that he decided to add this brief monologue which helps explains the character of Harry Lime and the meaning of the “third man”.
Great Film and TV Monologues
Through the Shattered Lens 