“In Italy for thirty 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.”
—Harry Lime, from The Third Man
Harry Lime is one of my absolute favorite movie villains, and this line is the best in the movie.
Graham Greene himself said that, that it was the best line in his movie, and that Orson Welles came up with it himself the night before shooting. Welles later said that Alsatians invented the clock, but if he’d told an audience that, they’d be busy wondering about dogs and miss the point. When Welles said that, he knew quite well that the clock had been invented in Lorraine.
Incidentally, Welles famously contradicted that in interviews. He lied a LOT in interviews. That was, after all, his profession.
Now, if you do a Google search, or ask any chatbot, they’ll tell you that I’m lying about what Orson Welles said about Alsace and the line, that he admitted his complete ignorance, and that he stole the bit about cuckoo clocks from an obscure 19th-century Hungarian play. They’ll also tell you that the clock was invented in the Schwartzwald, which is on the other side of the Rhine from Alsace, which appears to neatly undercut my point.
To this, I’ll answer: First, that the first cuckoo clock was observed in Saxony, the product of a local craftsman in the 1600s. Saxony is on the opposite side of Germany. Second, that there’s no evidence of the existence of such a play, and that the quote instead originated in the late Victorian lectures of Whistler (of Whistler’s Mother fame).
I’ve read the written lecture in “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies”. Welles would certainly have been familiar with it, and the dramatic nature of its reading. The line about the prisoned cuckoo directly precedes the powerful “For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!” Thus, an orator of his talent would absolutely have remembered it.
On the unlikely off chance he didn’t, Welles spent his life in the theater, surrounded by artists that loved and revered Whistler. The epigram was much in vogue in America at the time. To assert Welles was unfamiliar would be unlikely indeed.
Curiously, Whistler never said that the Swiss had invented the clock themselves. His point, in fact, was that this people, surrounded as they were by stunning natural beauties for their entire lives, were famous for their lack of artistic temperament, instead being lovers of routine and of regimented society. If one considers the spirit of whimsy that would have led to the creation of the cuckoo clock in the first place, it’s quite evident that only a major fluke would have permitted it to ever have been invented there, for the individual is universally compelled to submit to the dictates of that society which surrounds him.
All of which returns naturally to underline the point which Welles made so often in his career, that the entire business of the storyteller is to convey a truth that’s more true than the literal. Indeed, if one fails to transcend literal truth, one is unable to capture the attention of the audience and thus fails as a storyteller.
The Harry Lime line is often quoted by the insensitive in support for war and violence. They conveniently neglect that Harry Lime was a villain — one with virtues, like loyalty, urbanity, education, style, but a ruthless murderous profiteer nonetheless.
THAT is the point of the story.
All that business about Alsatians, is just that: business, in the theater sense. From it arises the art in a story, but after the reading it falls by the wayside, forever forgotten.
