- Old man, you really shouldn’t have gone to the police, you know. You ought to leave this thing alone.
So, here’s the thing. I know all the stories about Orson and this film, from both sides, and I love Orson, and I love Carol Reed, and this is one of my favourite films of all time, and obviously Orson steals the show because we all spend three quarters of the film hearing all about Harry Lime before he appears, and then he APPEARS like the very devil. And the ‘cuckoo clock’ speech is massively famous, both for Orson claiming to have ad libbed it, and because it’s a great speech, brilliantly delivered (the throwawayness of ‘the cuckoo clock’).
You know what I think often gets overlooked? It’s Orson’s acting in this scene. Obviously it’s full of quotable lines (’the dead are happier dead’, ‘would you really care, old boy, if one of those dots stopped moving?’) and he delivers them in classic Orson style which isn’t over the top, or hammy, or scene stealing. It’s throwaway, conversational, distracted, which is actually what Orson is like in lots of his films. (see also: Charles Laughton, Bob Newton). And here is a quiet, conversational scene between two old old friends, and they are talking about not just how easy murder is, and how lucrative, but how easy it would be for one of them to kill the other, right now. And it’s all low key, and super undramatic, and it’s pretty fucking scary.
And Orson does this thing, in these gifs, where he switches from totally cold and matter-of-fact (when Holly’s looking away) to smililng and jovial (when Holly is looking at him). And that’s the point where you realise Harry Lime is at least a sociopath, and has no qualms about anything but his own skin, and he’s been acting his entire life.