I couldn't fully appreciate The Third Man when I saw it as a teenager on TV. Partly because I was too young, and partly because it was chopped to bits with commercials and looked bad on TV. However, I still managed to be impressed by Welles's famous speech:

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo 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."*

Unfortunately I mentioned this to an ageing hippie who taught at the local junior college who promptly said "Orson knows better than that," thus slamming shut any discussion on it and, although I didn't know it at the time, summing up everything wrong with hippies. This is obviously why I became a punk rocker for two weeks a few years later. Hey, late 70s, it was punk or disco and there was no internet to tell you anything else; which one would you choose?

There's another Welles quote that I liked when I was reading about "The Third Man" and IMDB. (how did I ever watch movies before the internet? I just don't know.):

"If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girl friends. And they tolerated it and let us go ahead and play with our toys."

If this is true, then fanboys are the missing link. Hm.

*Okay, YouTube-ites, where's the clip of this masterpiece? Hm?

And I was wondering, why couldn't I find the clip I found by searching The Thrid Man but backed into it searching Valli? Weird. Does YouTube have a hidden search function? A la, we have it, but you have to work extra hard to find it.

Posted by GM

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Updated: April 8, 2006

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