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| At no point on this ride did I threaten to kill Joseph Cotten |
Of course, all of my walks through Vienna take me past the Opera. This being the first sunny day in Vienna -- maybe the first sunny day of the trip -- and everything photographs better in the sun, this warranted yet another picture of this massive structure.
I took the U1 metro line to Praterstern, which I caught at Karlplatz station just south of the Opera.
And there was the giant Ferris Wheel, known in Vienna-speak as the Wiener Riesenrad, or Vienna Giant Wheel.
If you remember the scene from the movie, with Orson Welles's Harry Lime riding the Riesenrad with Joseph Cotten's Holly Martins, the two calmly discussing whether Lime should off his best pal Martins, the wheel turns very slowly. And the cars are the size of a Viennese hotel room.
Did I mention my hotel room was small?
On a cold, but sunny, Wednesday morning in December, there was a small line to buy tickets for the Big Wheel. I bought my ticket and got on board for a ride.
The Riesenrad turned slow, so I wasn't worried about motion sickness.
And, being in an enclosed box, feared of heights did not kick in. Maybe if the box hadn't been so stable, that would've been a problem.
I sound like a wuss. Motion sickness! Fear of heights! Fear of enclosed spaces! Like Charlie Brown in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," it's like I've got pantophobia: the fear of everything,
Actually, the views from the top of the circle were quite nice. You could even see the spires of St. Stephen's.
And this is the point where you look down and think of the dialog from the scene in "The Third Man" where Harry Lime compares the people below to dots and asks Holly Martins that if he offered 20,000 pounds for each of the dots, would he keep his money or "calculate how many dots you could afford to spare ... free of income tax."
And that part isn't even the best part of the whole scene at the Riesenrad, which would be the famous Orson Welles "cuckoo clock" speech, maybe the greatest monologue in the movies, which you can click here to hear.
In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, murder, terror, bloodshead. And, for this morning, I have the rest of the Prater to explore.
You don't pay to be admitted to the park. You buy a ticket for each ride. This being winter, a lot of the rides appeared to be closed.
A lot of the attractions seemed to be "haunted house" themed, too. There is no human selling tickets to this haunted house. Only some sort of animatronic evil spirit.
This rollercoaster seemed to be down for the season.
This ride, the Sombrero, seems to be all sorts of politically incorrect.
There was a Las Vegas themed bar on the premises. I think this was added after "The Third Man" was filmed here in 1949.
The bumper cars were up and running:
But I came to Prater to ride the wheel. The wheel had been ridden, so it was time for my next "Third Man" destination.
The U3 line to Simmering, then it's catch the #71 tram to my next stop:
Zentralfriedhof.
Vienna Central Cemetery.
Two important points in "The Third Man" take place here: the opening and the closing. The opening scene is the burial of Harry Lime in Zentralfriedhof. I'm not sure exactly where in the cemetery it was that Lime was buried, but there's no point in checking that out because (a) the movie is fictional and (b) the burial in the fictional movie was fictional as Harry Lime was not actually dead at the movie's opening.
So instead let's find Beethoven's grave. And here he is:
Right next to him was Schubert.
And in the same section, sadly underappreciated with an underwhelming number of flowers, is Brahms.
Go to sleep, Johannes Brahms, go to sleep.
This is the composer section of Zentalfriedhof. The above is a memorial statue to Mozart. But Mozart is buried back in Vienna.
Across the way was this interesting looking tomb:
This actually is the most interesting cemetery I've ever seen. The headstones are not universally traditional by any means.
Moving on, meet Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, whose equations on the property of atoms were scorned in his day. He committed suicide in disgrace, the scientific consensus thought he was a fool, but after his death, he was exonerated, His theorems were proven true.
His tomb bears the equation of S = k log W. The formula for entropy. Living my life as a gradual descent into chaos and disorder, I thought a graveside "selfie" was in order.
Next up was the artist's section.
That is the grave of the artist Franz West. Below is a gravestone that took the form of a white cloth draped over a piano:
Multiple interesting headstones in this "honors" section of the cemetery.
This was my favorite. I think it's the most beautiful "gravestone" I've ever seen.
I looked at the plaque to see who it could be:
Actress and inventor, the beautiful Hedy Lamarr. I didn't even know she was buried here or that she was Viennese.
Selfie with Hedy?
Interesting tombstones all around in this neck of the cemetery woods.
The final one, the fat cat above, is Austrian artist Manfred Deix. Don't feel inferior if you have not heard him, his wikipedia page is only in German.
You will see them lurking in the background in a number of shots. Second, there are the cemetery walkways.
I don't know which one is THE one where the famous final scene was shot, the landscaping being different, but that final camera shot, linked here, is one of the great movie-ending scenes, where at the scene of Harry Lime's real funeral, Joseph Cotton's Holly Martins waits for the beautiful Anna as she approaches from a distance and ... then ... walks right past him without a glance.
I'm walking in this section of the cemetery looking for the grave of ...
The Pride of Austria! Vienna's own Falco! Still well remembered even more than 30 years after his major U.S. hits. Which was your favorite? Pick one as your musical accompaniment here: (1) the dark, brooding Der Kommissar, where Falco makes German a great language for rap; (2) the international dance smash Rock Me Amadeus, which made Falco an international superstar; or the jaunty fun of Vienna Calling.
This interesting tombstone was right next door.
But there are only so many interesting tombstones one can view in a day. Back on the tram!
Back to Karlplatz.
And here I find the Third Man Museum.
I thought it was opened on Wednesdays, but it is only open Saturday afternoons. So I went to a nearby coffee shop, for a coffee, a (gluten free) Esterhazy schnitte (very very hazelnut), and a vanilla macaron.
A civilized way to rest my barking dogs. And what was the music playing in the coffee shop? It wasn't Falco. It wasn't Christmas music. But it was awesome. It was THIS.
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