Re: "The Third Man" wins the Grand Prix at Cannes (17/9/1949)

On 9/17/2024 4:09 AM, Ross Clark wrote:
> Story by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed, with Orson Welles in a 
> central role. Noirish occupied Vienna in 1946.
> 
> I certainly remember Anton Karas's theme tune on the zither; it was on 
> the radio a lot when the film was new. But I was a small boy, and this 
> was not a suitable film. I didn't see it until maybe a decade later.
> 
> And the language angle? The envelope, please...
> 
> Crystal references a paper he gave at a conference a few years ago: 
> "Going Especially Careful: Language Reference in Graham Greene".
> To my surprise, it's right here:
> 
> https://www.davidcrystal.com/Files/BooksAndArticles/-4838.pdf
> 
> But just to summarize the points for today:
> 
> Greene never said much explicitly about language.
> But his characters notice it and talk about it all the time.
> And "whenever there's explicit reference -- to accent, words, grammar -- 
> or to individual languages and dialects, it's a sign that trouble is 
> brewing.
> [I want to jump up and say, "But trouble is brewing all the time in 
> Graham Greene's novels, so the correlation is not significant." But I 
> won't.]
> 
> Anyhow: language-related plot elements in The Third Man:
> 
> - The point-of-view/narrator character (played by Joseph Cotton) is a 
> novelist.
> - He has come to Vienna to write advertising/propaganda for his old 
> friend Harry Lime (Welles).
> - He can't speak German, so has to rely on interpreters a lot, and gets 
> into difficulties when he hasn't got one.
> - The people he meets have strange names, which he often gets wrong.
> - He ends up having to give a lecture on a subject he knows nothing 
> about, and is lost for words. In answer to a question he says "Well, 
> yes, I suppose that is what I meant to say."
> 
> There's more at the link above.
> 
> Just in case you don't know this film, the most famous quote from it is 
> Harry's "cuckoo clock" speech before he disappears, which has nothing to 
> do with language:
> 
> (as rendered on IMDb)
> 
> Harry Lime: Don't be so gloomy. After all, it's not that awful. Like the 
> fella says, in Italy for 30 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 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? 
> The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.


 > - He ends up having to give a lecture on a subject he knows nothing
 >                  about, and is lost for words.


this used to be a common setup in Old(er) movies  ... There's a
               fav. Hitchcock movie containing a scene like that.


_______________

i don't think of  [The Third Man]  as particularly  Ling-intensive.

[A Clockwork Orange] or [To Build a Fire] (both with Burgess)
          or [My Fair Lady]
            are much more Ling-intensive.