The Cuckoo Clock Speech

Video Find of the Day

After Forbidden Zone, my next favorite movie is The Third Man, which was released in 1949, the year I was born. And my favorite scene in that movie is this one, in which Holly confronts Harry Lime at the Riesenrad, the Ferris wheel in Vienna's Prater amusement park, and Harry (who has faked his own death to put the police off his trail) threatens to kill his old friend Holly to protect his cover, until he learns that the jig is already up. Then on the ground he gives the cuckoo clock speech. The speech was Orson Welles' addition to the script. It's not at all historically accurate. the Swiss didn't even invent the cuckoo clock, and the 500 years of peace is an extreme stretch of the imagination. But even so it makes poetry.

The Third Man (Carol Reed)