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

This is not an animated film. It is a live action production so
please remeve rec.arts.anime.misc from your future postings
about live action films not made in Japan.

Neither is it a James Joyce book.

bliss

On 9/18/24 01:06, HenHanna wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
> 


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