Story by Graham Greene, directed by Carol Reed, with Orson Welles in a
central role. Noirish occupied Vienna in 1946.

I certainly remember Anton Karas's theme tune on the zither; it was on
the radio a lot when the film was new. But I was a small boy, and this
was not a suitable film. I didn't see it until maybe a decade later.

And the language angle? The envelope, please...

Crystal references a paper he gave at a conference a few years ago:
"Going Especially Careful: Language Reference in Graham Greene".
To my surprise, it's right here:

https://www.davidcrystal.com/Files/BooksAndArticles/-4838.pdf

But just to summarize the points for today:

Greene never said much explicitly about language.
But his characters notice it and talk about it all the time.
And "whenever there's explicit reference -- to accent, words, grammar --
or to individual languages and dialects, it's a sign that trouble is
brewing.
[I want to jump up and say, "But trouble is brewing all the time in
Graham Greene's novels, so the correlation is not significant." But I
won't.]

Anyhow: language-related plot elements in The Third Man:

- The point-of-view/narrator character (played by Joseph Cotten) is a
novelist.
- He has come to Vienna to write advertising/propaganda for his old
friend Harry Lime (Welles).
- He can't speak German, so has to rely on interpreters a lot, and gets
into difficulties when he hasn't got one.
- The people he meets have strange names, which he often gets wrong.
- He ends up having to give a lecture on a subject he knows nothing
about, and is lost for words. In answer to a question he says "Well,
yes, I suppose that is what I meant to say."

There's more at the link above.

Just in case you don't know this film, the most famous quote from it is
Harry's "cuckoo clock" speech before he disappears, which has nothing to
do with language:

(as rendered on IMDb)

Harry Lime: Don't be so gloomy. After all, it's not that awful. Like the
fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the 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. So long, Holly.

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