The Third Man - Score

Score

What sort of music it is, whether jaunty or sad, fierce or provoking, it would be hard to reckon; but under its enthrallment, the camera comes into play ... The unseen zither-player ... is made to employ his instrument much as the Homeric bard did his lyre.

The musical score was composed by Anton Karas and played by him on the zither. Before the production came to Vienna, Karas was an unknown wine bar performer. According to a November 1949 Time magazine article:

The picture demanded music appropriate to post-World War II Vienna, but director Reed had made up his mind to avoid schmalzy, heavily orchestrated waltzes. In Vienna one night Reed listened to a wine-garden zitherist named Anton Karas, was fascinated by the jangling melancholy of his music.

Reed later brought Karas to London, where the musician spent six weeks working with Reed on the score. Decades later, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "Has there ever been a film where the music more perfectly suited the action than in Carol Reed's The Third Man?"

"The Third Man Theme" was released as a single in 1949/50 (Decca in the UK, London Records in the US). It became a best-seller—by November 1949, 300,000 records had been sold in Britain, with the teen-aged Princess Margaret a reported fan. Following its release in the U.S. in 1950 (see 1950 in music), "The Third Man Theme" spent eleven weeks at number one on Billboard's U.S. Best Sellers in Stores chart, from 29 April to 8 July. The exposure made Karas an international star, and the trailer for the film stated that "the famous musical score by Anton Karas" would have the audience "in a dither with his zither".

The comedian Victor Borge covered the theme on piano for his 1955 album Caught in the Act, and a version with a faster tempo and without the zither was featured on the 1965 album Going Places by Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass. The music is also used in a bar scene in the 2002 Vin Diesel action film xXx. Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer's comedy troupe The Lonely Island used a sample of the theme song on the song "Stork Patrol". The theme also is used for the title sequence of "Ebert Presents At the Movies."