[lit-ideas] Re: The Third Man, five hundred years of democracy and...the cuckoo clock
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:00:57 -0700
On Jul 17, 2010, at 11:27 PM, Richard Henninge wrote:
On the other hand, there is just compensation for the nervy music
in at least one line of The Third Man
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv1QDlWbS8g
As Harry Mount said in The Spectator on April 7, 2009:
"How right Orson Welles was, then, in his improvised speech on the
Prater Wheel.
‘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.’
Welles later said, ‘When the picture came out, the Swiss very
nicely pointed out to me that they’ve never made any cuckoo clocks.’
One daughter, looking after cows this summer, high in the mountains
of Switzerland, thinks, "That clock is very persistent." She'd never
heard a cuckoo.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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