"After all, it’s not that awful — you know what the fellow said…In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed — they produced Michaelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce…? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly."
Welles is on the screen for what, 10 minutes? Is there any other movie where a character is only on the screen for 10 minutes and completely dominates the proceedings to that degree?
FYI, I collect old radio shows, and I have some MP3s of a British series Welles did during the '50s called "The Adventures of Harry Lime," where the plot line nominally "predated" Vienna ... the beginning is a pistol shot, then Welles does a voice over about how that was the shot that killed Harry Lime in the sewers of Vienna, but that it was the end of the story and not the beginning, that Harry Lime had many lives, which he knew because he was Harry Lime, then the zither music starts ... and Welles plays Lime as kind of a lovable expatriate rogue who's always getting involved in some kind of suspenseful intrigue. They're kind of uneven, some of them get out into the ozone plotwise, but the best of them are quite interesting to listen to and Welles plays the character wonderfully.