Editing The Third Man (section)

==="Cuckoo clock" speech===
In a famous scene, Lime meets Martins on the [[Wiener Riesenrad]] in the [[Leopoldstadt|Prater]] amusement park. Looking down on the people below from his vantage point, Lime compares them to dots, and says that it would be insignificant if one of them or a few of them "stopped moving, forever". Back on the ground, he notes:

<blockquote>You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for 30 years under the [[House of Borgia|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]]!</blockquote>

According to scriptwriter Graham Greene, "the popular line of dialogue concerning Swiss cuckoo clocks was written into the script by Mr Welles himself" (in the published script, it is in a footnote).<ref>{{Cite book |last=Greene |first=Graham |title=The Third Man |publisher=Penguin |year=1950 |isbn=0140286829 |location=Harmonsworth |pages=9}}</ref> Greene wrote in a letter that "What happened was that during the shooting of ''The Third Man'' it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence."<ref>13 October 1977</ref> Welles apparently said the lines came from "an old Hungarian play"—in any event the idea is not original to Welles, as acknowledged by the phrase "what the fellow said". The likeliest source is the painter [[James Abbott McNeill Whistler]]; in an 1885 lecture published in ''Mr Whistler's "Ten O'Clock{{"-}}'' in 1888, he said that "The Swiss in their mountains&nbsp;... What more worthy people!&nbsp;... yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was [[William Tell|Tell]] a hero! For this did [[Albrecht Gessler|Gessler]] die!" In a 1916 reminiscence, American painter [[Theodore Wores]] said that he "tried to get an acknowledgment from Whistler that San Francisco would some day become a great art center on account of our climatic, scenic and other advantages. 'But environment does not lead to a production of art,' Whistler retorted. 'Consider Switzerland. There the people have everything in the form of natural advantages—mountains, valleys and blue sky. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock!"<ref>''San Francisco Town Talk'', 26 February 1916, reported in [https://archive.org/stream/californiaartres10hail#page/n255/mode/2up ''California Art Research'': Charles J. Dickman, Xavier Martinez, Charles R. Peters, Theodore Wores, 1936].</ref>

Welles also may have been influenced by [[Geoffrey Household]], who wrote in his 1939 novel ''[[Rogue Male (novel)|Rogue Male]]'': "...Swiss. A people, my dear fellow, of quite extraordinary stupidity and immorality. A combination which only a long experience of democratic government could have produced."{{Citation needed|date=August 2024}}

''This Is Orson Welles'' (1993) quotes Welles: "When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they've never made any cuckoo clocks,"<ref>Nigel Rees, ''Brewer's Famous Quotations'', Sterling, 2006, pp. 485–86.</ref> as cuckoo clocks were actually invented in the German [[Black Forest]]. Writer [[John McPhee]] pointed out that when the Borgias flourished in Italy, Switzerland had "the most powerful and feared military force in Europe" and was not the neutral country it later became.<ref>[[John McPhee|McPhee, John]]. ''La Place de la Concorde Suisse''. New York, Noonday Press ([[Farrar, Straus and Giroux]]), 1984. McPhee is quoting "The Swiss at War" by Douglas Miller.</ref>