Off the script
A fascinating bit of cinema backstory from McPhee’s fact-checking opus, “Checkpoints,” reprinted in Silk Parachute, which my buddy Matt Martin gave me as a housewarming gift the other week and I’m finally digging into.
In describing a piece he wrote on Switzerland, McPhee quotes a terrific lines from Orson Welles in “The Third Man,” a noir film set in post-war Vienna, which I have to admit I’ve never seen:
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — but they produced Michelangelo, Leondardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
I love that line. But what I love even more is what McPhee (or his fact-checker) discovered in researching its origin:
[We] learned … that Graham Greene, who wrote the screenplay of “The Third Man,” only later published the preliminary treatment, as a novella, and the cuckoo-clock speech does not appear either in the novella or the original screenplay. Greene did not write it. Orson Welles thought it up and said it.
You can watch the Ferris-wheel scene here. The cuckoo-clock speech appears at the very end of the clip.
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