The Third Man and the third medium: radio and the characterization of Harry Lime

Abstract

This essay argues that the radio drama The Adventures of Harry Lime, also called The Lives of Harry Lime, alters the characterization of its eponymous hero, who previously appeared as the antagonist in Carol Reed's film The Third Man and Graham Greene's novel of the same name. In the latter media, Harry Lime develops as a truly evil character, a black marketeer and an unrepentant child murderer. In the radio drama, Lime becomes little more than a roguish criminal, a Robin Hood errant. One reason for this change, which manifests itself in conjunction with differences in the point of view, the ironic function of the zither music, and the setting, concerns the need of a weekly radio drama to forbear from violating what Aristotle calls ‘the moral sense’. A more important reason concerns the needs of the glamorous detective genre, the format the programme employs.