Living Cities: Exploring Harry Lime’s Vienna

A conversation on what makes a livable city.
By AITOR HERNÁNDEZ-MORALES
With GIOVANNA COI
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Happy Thursday, city-lovers!
This week we’re stepping into the silver screen and visiting the Vienna of 1949.
Further down, we turn to Scotland, where soaring costs are pricing performers out of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HARRY LIME: This Saturday marks the 75th anniversary of the premiere of “The Third Man,” the noir classic that made Vienna famous around the world as a place of international intrigue, resilient beauty and folksy charm. In celebration, special screenings of the film are being held in the Austrian capital, where fans can also take tours of the shooting locations and even enjoy a dinner on the famed Ferris wheel where Harry Lime delivered his legendary cuckoo clock speech. This week we’re taking a closer look at that thriller’s relationship with the city — and vice versa. Fair warning: spoilers throughout.
Much more than a backdrop: “The Third Man” is about a writer who goes to Vienna to solve the mystery of his best friend’s murder. With shocking sang-froid, director Carol Reed filmed the movie on location in the city’s postwar ruins, while it was still occupied by the Allies and divided into American, British, French and Russian-controlled zones. The classic gives us a glimpse at a grim urban landscape that’s hard to imagine now, when the rebuilt Austrian capital is once again a Central European jewel box. The shots of a burnt-out St. Stephen’s Cathedral and views of the desolate Prater are reminders of the Viennese people’s suffering — and their resilience.
Long live infrastructure: There are many great, early films about cities — think 1927’s “Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt” — but “The Third Man” is perhaps the first to put urban infrastructure front and center. The movie’s final act occurs in Vienna’s sewers, a 19th-century wonder that spans 2,500 kilometers. The expressionist shots of Orson Welles’ character running through the tunnels make for an iconic piece of cinematography and a celebration of municipal engineering.
The expat view: Throughout “The Third Man,” the American lead character interacts with a haughty English major, a Hungarian actress, a Romanian contrabandist and a flurry of Allied soldiers. The Austrians in the movie are relegated to being secondary characters like the hapless doorman at Harry Lime’s flat or the sinister Baron Kurtz and Dr. Winkel, or visibly miserable, silent elements in the background. The depiction reflects their powerless status in the occupied city, which perhaps explains why “The Third Man” went down as a much-loathed flop when it was screened in Vienna 75 years ago.
And yet: Viewers who speak German can attest that there’s another, untranslated dimension to the film that reaffirms the dignity of the locals and the cruelties they faced in postwar Vienna. The dismissiveness with which British troops treat an aged balloon seller or the concierge at the Hotel Sacher underlines stoic resolve in the face of rudeness. In her depiction of a harried landlady, legendary actress Hedwig Bleibtreu steals the show by pointedly reminding the Allied troops that the bombed-out building they’re carelessly raiding used to be inhabited by members of the noble Metternich family.
In the end … The city’s residents get a last laugh of sorts. The film’s villain, a man who poisoned Viennese children with counterfeit medicine, is taken down in a raid executed not by the occupying authorities but by actual members of Vienna’s white-suited sewer police. Foreign armies may be powerful, but some jobs can only be done by local workers.
FLEECE THE FOREIGNERS: An investigative report published by Expresso reveals restaurants in Lisbon now have higher-priced menus printed for visitors and expats — either short-term visitors or digital nomads — and cheaper options for Portuguese patrons who earn less than their foreign counterparts. Lawyers warn that it is “extremely illegal” to discriminate based on nationality.
BRIGHT IDEA: Warsaw has replaced 37,000 sodium or metal halide light fixtures with LED models as part of a multiyear campaign to make its street lighting greener. The measure is expected to slash illumination-related energy consumption by 35 percent and save the city 36 million złoty (€ 8,371,800) annually.
CARE FOR COHESION: A new Eurocities report tracks how the EU’s cohesion policy — the cash used to boost growth in the bloc’s poorer regions and reduce inequality — has become crucial for urban transformation across the Continent.
LONDON TOPS CITIES FOR HEART HEALTH: London ranks among one of the top cities in the world for its efforts to tackle cardiovascular diseases, according to a new report by the World Heart Federation, closely followed by other European cities including Madrid and Berlin.
SOUNDS OF THE CITY: Leyla and Paul return to grace our semi-regular arts and culture section with another musical treat, which follows this week’s Viennese theme by channeling the spirit of the Austrian capital.
“Barely scratching the surface of a city that exudes music, we took a deep dive into Vienna’s sonic past and present, Starting off with Anton Karas’ zither salute to Harry Lime — an idiosyncratic balance of drama and whimsy,” Leyla said. “We followed that with works by the many composers now synonymous with the Austrian capital, added some of its musicians making noise today and sprinkled in odes — from home and abroad — saluting the city’s coffee houses, river banks and even its siege.”
PRICED-OUT PERFORMERS: The first time comedian Eddy Hare went to the Edinburgh Fringe — the world’s largest performance arts festival — 12 years ago, he and two friends paid £500 to share a double room for all of August.
Although Hare was consigned to an airbed, he told my colleague Edith that he was fine with the arrangement. “You have a lot of comedians who are willing to make no money or lose money,” he explained. This year, however, Hare said his friends had been forced to spend £1700 each to get a single mattress in a spartan room normally rented out to students.
Like others, the comedian acknowledged the skyrocketing costs associated with the festival were making him rethink his yearly attendance. Housing in Edinburgh is now a “prohibitive problem,” with a “knock-on effect” for performers.
No laughing matter: The Edinburgh Fringe has made the city a premiere location for both established comedians and up-and-comers desperate to get a foot on the ladder. Classics like “Beyond the Fringe,” “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” and, more recently, the one-woman play that became the hit “Fleabag” series were all first performed during the event. More than 2 million tickets were sold for some 3,300 shows for the 77th edition of the festival.
But rising costs on everything from rent and transport to advertising performances have long plagued the event. It has gotten “100 percent” worse, said comedian Alex Franklin. The performer recalled that in 2017 she and her friends had felt fleeced when they had been charged £500 each to rent a flat in the city for just two weeks. “Now, that’s a stunning deal!”
Franklin added that two people she knows shared a single bed this month just to ease the financial burden. With little hope that the situation will improve next year, Franklin said she had doubts about attending in 2025.
Big-name boycott: Higher prices in Edinburgh are leading high-profile performers to pass on the Fringe. In 2022 more than 1,600 people, including big names like Joe Lycett, signed an open letter criticizing the event’s organizers in part for not doing enough to support performers faced with soaring accommodation costs.
In a recent post announcing he’d be skipping the event, comedian Richard Herring similarly said that the Fringe — an event begun by rebel performers seeking to break from the city’s more mainstream International Festival — was becoming one where “only people with a fair amount of wealth can attend, both as participants and audience.”
Shona McCarthy, chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, admitted this week that the “cumulative effect of the relentless rise in the cost of everything … has resulted in widespread concern that is keenly felt by artists.”
Some performers have proposed an industry-wide boycott until the situation becomes more manageable, but Hare expressed doubts about its effectiveness. “It’s quite hard to try [to] get a collective agreement,” he said. “I don’t really know what the solution would be.”
We’re back with our weekly cities-related trivia challenge! Melinda Szabo of Simleu Silvaniei was the quickest reader to identify Belgium’s Brussels-to-Mechelen railway line as the first to transport passengers in continental Europe: Some 900 luminaries — among them novelist Victor Hugo — joined the inaugural voyage in 1835.
For security reasons likely linked to the disastrous 1830 opening of the Liverpool-to-Manchester line in the United Kingdom — during which the world’s first passenger train-on-train collision took place — Belgian King Leopold I did not officially participate in that first trip. Legend says he secretly came aboard in disguise.
This week’s challenge: For the past four years one European city has, for a limited time, allowed residents to get free public transport access in exchange for doing a specific kind of up-and-down physical exercise. The first reader to identify both the city and the feat of fitness gets a shout-out in next week’s newsletter.
— Following a moderate earthquake off the coast of Portugal on Monday, Lisbon Mayor Carlos Moedas told SIC the city was prepared to face a major tremor — something experts strenuously dispute.
— A group of locals in O Morrazo, Spain staged a protest against excessive tourism this weekend by continuously traversing a crosswalk in the city center, La Voz de Galicia reports.
— Across the Atlantic, the U.S. government is suing a real estate company for helping landlords collude to raise rents across the country, the New York Times reports.
THANKS TO: Edith Hancock, Leyla Aksu, Paul Dallison, Claudia Chiappa, my editors Kelsey Hayes and Stephan Faris, and producer Giulia Poloni.
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POLITICO’s Global Policy Lab is a collaborative journalism project seeking solutions to challenges faced by modern societies in an age of rapid change. Over the coming months we will host a conversation on how to make cities more livable and sustainable.