Secretary who saved The Third Man from the bin
Director Carol Reed had no time to read Graham Green novel but was hooked by a précis of the plot by his lowly assistant
IT HAS been hailed as the greatest British film ever, but it has now emerged might never have been made had it not been for the writing skills of a lowly studio secretary.
When the film director Carol Reed was sent the unpublished story that would eventually become the classic screen noir he tossed the copy over to his secretary, stating that he did not have time to read it.
Fortunately the young Joyce Hedger was able to produce such a gripping summary of Graham Green’s novella that Reed was hooked, and decided to take on the project – casting Orson Welles as the post-war black marketeer Harry Lime.
But there were further hurdles to overcome before the film could be completed, such as when Welles stormed off the set of the famous Vienna sewers scene, because he did not want to wait for Reed to arrive.
These remarkable insights into the troubled background to the making
– picked by the British Film Institute as the best British film ever made – are to be revealed in Sunday’s episode of the BBC’s
They emerged when Joyce’s son, Guy Bowden, brought his mother’s copy of the film screenplay, along with letters and photographs to the roadshow for valuation.
As Reed’s secretary, Joyce accompanied the director to Vienna in 1948 for the duration of the filming of the story of an American pulpfiction writer’s attempt to track down his childhood friend Line in the war-ravaged city, now occupied by the Allied powers.
But Mr Bowden said the film very nearly failed to get off the ground.
“Carol Reed was reputedly very cantankerous and difficult. My mother told me that when he first received
story in draft form he said to her ‘I don’t have time to read this’ and tossed it over to her and told her to do a précis of it,” he said.
“Well I guess she must have done it well enough for him to be interested in making the film. You could say it wouldn’t have been made without her input.”
Joyce, who had worked as an RAF driver and moved to London after the war, had been sent by an employment agency to work as a secretary for Reed, who had already made starring Michael Redgrave, and
with Rex Harrison. A film buff, Joyce seized on the chance of working for a renowned director and the opportunity it gave her to watch the production process first hand. Years later she told her son that many of the scenes in which Harry Lime appears in the distance, or in silhouette, were in fact filmed before Welles arrived on set, with assistant director Guy Hamilton standing in for him. And – in one of her letters from Vienna to her fiancé, Mr Bowden’s father Ron – Joyce, then 26, revealed that things did not go smoothly when Welles finally turned up. She wrote disparagingly of the Hollywood star, who had already made his name co-writing, directing and starring in the 1941 classic
Mr Bowden, a retired social worker from Chepstow, said: “My mother never had a bad word to say about anyone, so I was quite surprised with what she had to say about Orson Welles. She wrote that he was very short-tempered and didn’t stay long on the set.”
Indeed in one of her letters to Ron she says: “The great Orson Welles has arrived now, everybody loathes him.”
Joyce continues: “The first day he was called he arrived on set which happened to be in the sewer, everybody was ready and had taken ages to line up the shot for him. Carol was to arrive in two minutes from working with the other units but because he had to wait the two minutes Orson was furious and walked out and came back here” [the hotel where the crew was staying].
She does, however, go on to state: “But everyone agrees he is absolutely wonderful in the part.”
Joyce returned from Vienna and married Ron in 1949, the year
was released. Her husband, who had also served in the RAF, became an air traffic controller and she accompanied him on his postings to airports around the country. It was only after her death last year, at the age of 93, that Mr Bowden came across the script and letters she had kept from her time in the Austrian capital.
The working script, which she typed on set, offers a fascinating glimpse into the many changes the film underwent during the production process.
Missing from it is Welles’s famous “cuckoo clock” speech, which was added during filming by the actor himself and went on to become one of the most famous passages in British film history. In it Lime 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 five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” The new series of
starts on BBC One at 8pm.