The Third Man’s teddy bear scene based on real life

Graham Greene’s screenplay/novella The Third Man is a much celebrated work of fiction but actually much of it was based on all-too-real life.

It is widely known among Third Man scholars that the watered-down penicillin racket at the heart of his tale was factually true and an event repeated time and again around the world in the early years of post-war penicillin.

Greene ripped right from the front pages of his daily papers.

And every film viewer remembers the very moral crux of the novella : the famous —-silent scene —- when the Canadian pulp writer Rollo Martins sees a discarded teddy tossed into a medical waste bin and realizes that yet another child has died from Harry Lime’s watered down penicillin and decides to lure him to his arrest.

But who realizes that this too was based on an actual news story that Greene had learned about during WWII itself ?

In August 1943 , Marie Barker was a young Chicago woman, one of thousands around the world summarily condemned to a certain death because modern medicine death panels deemed her invariably-fatal-if-untreated condition (SBE : subacute bacterial endocarditis) ‘a not a militarily important disease’.

Refused Penicillin Condemned to Death Marie Barker gets Teddy bear from Mom 

There is a famous and poignant newspaper photo of her French Canadian-born mom giving the grown-up twenty year old a child’s teddy bear, to cheer her up while her death sentence was being appealed.

But no penicillin ever came and Marie died a few weeks later.

In Marie’s case, I feel sure her medical staff was very much on her side and would have given her family the teddy bear after her death, but Greene certainly knew how to turn the emotional screws and he has his overworked medical staff at the Vienna hospital simply toss it in a bin of discarded medical waste.

Both scenes always get me —- maybe they will also get you too —- I sure hope so, as I plan to make that original teddy bear an important real-life symbol in my penicillin heroes & villains  book....

PS : In the two principal Allied superpower states, the USA and the UK, penicillin - by an undeserved twist of fate - was both cheap safe and abundant so the moral thrust of Harry Lime’s crime didn’t hit home like it did in the rest of the post-war world.

So a  52 part comic crime radio series on the pre-Vienna life of good old medical entrepreneur Harry Lime did  very well - particularly in the Us, where wheeler dealer huckster businessmen of all types were and are widely admired.

A view that easily TRUMPS any American evangelical-type concern about morality.

And why the Canadian-born Dr Dawson’s emphasis on life-saving medicine for all still falls on stony ground..