AUGUST 2006

In the film The Third Man Orson Welles’ character Harry Lime gives a short speech, something commonly attributed to Welles. This apparently was his one contribution to the screenplay written by Graham Greene. Welles seemed to hand credit to another source, but what that was is unclear. It is possible Welles was paraphrasing a section from a book by art critic and historian Thomas Craven titled Men of Art.

Countless online sources credit Welles:

Welles penned it himself and insisted that it be put in.
(Answers.com “the world's greatest encyclodicitonalmanacapedia”)

Welles penned it himself and insisted that it be put in. Greene is reputed to have hated it. (About.com; specifically “experts.about.com”)

[Graham] Greene says this speech was written by Welles. (Roger Ebert, December, 1996, from Rogerebert.com)

A few citations can be found suggesting Welles was repeating something he heard elsewhere:

Greene has conceded that this remark was not his own invention, but rather Welles’ contribution to the script. Welles himself admitted that he was inspired to his speech by a much smaller and older quote that implied the same. (Wikipedia.com)

Contributed by Welles to Graham Greene’s screenplay of the film in which Welles starred. Welles later claimed that the speech was based on a fragment of an old Hungarian play. (The Columbia world of quotations 1996, from Bartleby.com)

The famous “cuckoo clock” speech bears a strong resemblance to a statement Thomas Craven made years earlier. Here are the two side by side:

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, 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 Third Man, 1959)

[regarding the Renaissance] Does anyone suppose for a moment, considering the incomparable wealth and variety of Italian art, that such monumental records of imaginative power could have been produced by a civilization that ran along with the humdrum regularity of a Swiss village? -- (Thomas Craven, Men of Art, Simon and Schuster, 1931, pp. 61-62)

The Craven quote - the entire paragraph in which it’s found - was excerpted in Henry Elmer Barnes’ An Intellectual and Cultural History of the World, published in 1937 and again in 1941.

The probability of Welles having come across one of these books? Who knows. This is just a suggestion for the quote’s attribution. Below is the full paragraph in which the passage (highlighted) appears, including the sentences following it which are incorporated in the predicate of Welles’ speech:

From our picture of the Renaissance, its rapacity and crime, its bewildering profusion of baseness, bloodshed and unsettling violence, the reader may well wonder why it was that art flourished so magnificently. There is no absolute explanation. No one knows precisely why art is produced, why Michael Angelo, at such a terrific cost of mental agony, forfeiting all the pleasures of companionship and good living, sold himself to endless creative toil, why Donatello and Brunelleschi, penniless and starving, went off to Rome in their youth to spend their days and nights digging among the bones of antiquity. But this we do know: art inheres in the human soul and under certain conditions manifests itself with extraordinary fertility. Impulses, which, for want of a more definite name, are called spiritual, demand fulfillment, and the artist, viewing the gross activities of life with reason and contemplation finds order in lawless violence, significance in all experiences and permanence in transitory events. What circumstances are favorable to art is a question we will not attempt to decide. It is, I think, beyond dispute that when man is most free, when no artificial restraints are imposed upon him and it is possible for him to develop his individuality to its fullest capacities, that art if most likely to thrive. Does anyone suppose for a moment, considering the incomparable wealth and variety of Italian art, that such monumental records of imaginative power could have been produced by a civilization that ran along with the humdrum regularity of a Swiss village? The grandeur of Michael Angelo has its analogue in the grandeur of Julius II; we remember Cesare Borgia for his appalling brutality, but the frescoes of Andrea del Castagno contain similar qualities of terrible energy and vengeance; the fanaticism of Savonarola is matched by Ucello’s obsession with the scientific problems of perspective; the sexual proclivities of Alexander VI are not more notorious than those of Cellini; the spirit of mysticism and simple faith, before it was extinguished in the hearts of the ineffectual minority, found its perfect spokesman in Fra Angelico; at the other end of the scale, the elegant and sophisticated tastes o Leo X created a congenial atmosphere for the classical decorum of Raphael. Today we demand more stability and less art, and we may be assured that whenever life is secure and uneventful, art in the aggregate is bound to be a reflex of commonplace experiences.

 

Home | Contact

All contents copyright © 2003 Rat Blood Soup