Cuckoo clocks
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Jessica_Rabbit69 — 11 years ago(February 26, 2015 01:03 PM)
Good grief, what is so hard to understand about Lime's speech? It's a metaphor or an allegory if you will.
Yes, most people know that cuckoo clocks are not Swiss and that Switzerland has not always been the little peaceful and prosperous nation it has been for the last century. And somehow I'm sure this was clear to Harry Lime too. He was not an uneducated man.
What Lime means is that great works of human imagination, ingenuity and invention rarely arise during periods of relative tranquility.
Creation and enterprise do not come to life when one leads a serene life. Peace, prosperity and stability do not breed ambition to create something new and daring.
War, danger, tension, suffering, a hard life etc are in Lime's opinion a fertile environment for progress.
This is one of the all-time best quotes in film history and sums up the human condition perfectly in just a few words, for better or for worse. If Lime is 100% right is beside the point (though I daresay his assessment is often right), but it is his credo and also his justification for the atrocities he has committed.
Jessica Rabbit
"I'm not bad. I'm just drawn that way." -
MoviemanCin — 10 years ago(February 03, 2016 11:16 PM)
Yes we know all that Jessica. But Harry was still wrong. The cuckoo clock was invented in Germany. However this does not lessen the impact of Harry's speech in this wonderful film.
Schrodinger's cat walks into a bar, and / or doesn't. -
nedeljkodjukic88 — 10 years ago(July 24, 2015 01:38 PM)
From Wiki:
Greene wrote in a letter[19] "What happened was that during the shooting of The Third Man it was found necessary for the timing to insert another sentence." Welles apparently said the lines came from "an old Hungarian play"in any event the idea is not original to Welles, acknowledged by the phrase "what the fellow said".
The likeliest source is the painter Whistler. In a lecture on art from 1885 (published in Mr Whistler's 'Ten O'Clock' [1888]), he said, "The Swiss in their mountains What more worthy people! yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!" In a 1916 reminiscence,[20] American painter Theodore Wores said that he "tried to get an acknowledgment from Whistler that San Francisco would some day become a great art center on account of our climatic, scenic and other advantages. 'But environment does not lead to a production of art,' Whistler retorted. 'Consider Switzerland. There the people have everything in the form of natural advantages mountains, valleys and blue sky. And what have they produced? The cuckoo clock!"
This is Orson Welles (1993) quotes Welles: "When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they've never made any cuckoo clocks",[21] as the clocks are native to the German Black Forest. Writer John McPhee pointed out that when the Borgias flourished in Italy, Switzerland had "the most powerful and feared military force in Europe" and was not the peacefully neutral country it would later become