Renaissance Man Movie Quotes

The movie The Third Man takes place in Vienna immediately after the end of the Second World War. Reflecting on the recent conflict, the character Harry Lime says: ‘After all, it’s not that awful…In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Lime gets almost all his facts wrong – Switzerland was probably the most bloodthirsty corner of early modern Europe (its main export was mercenary soldiers), and the cuckoo clock was actually invented by the Germans – but the facts are of lesser importance than Lime’s idea, namely that the experience of war pushes humankind to new achievements. War allows natural selection free rein at last. It exterminates the weak and rewards the fierce and the ambitious. War exposes the truth about life, and awakens the will for power, for glory and for conquest. Nietzsche summed it up by saying that war is ‘the school of life’ and that ‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’.

kitchen as she serves Tony pasta and fills his glass with wine. Within the family structure, Tony, who has no father, is a patriarch who has the role of protecting his sister Cesca’s honour, while Mrs Camonte is the matriarch who guards the family’s morality. Yet the structure of Italian familialism is weakened to the point of being unable to provide a viable social model for American society. Tony is a degraded image of a patriarch whose protection of female honour only leads him to murder Cesca’s new husband Guino. Tony’s actions towards his sister are further represented as a form of incest exemplified in the scene where he rips off her clothes after seeing her dance with another man at the Paradise Club. As Peter Bondanella has noted, in the representation of Tony’s desire for Cesca, the film might even actualize a long Anglo-Saxon tradition of associating Italian cultural heritage with Renaissance duplicity and perverse forms of sexuality evocative of the Borgia family.9 But the film also neutralizes the other dimension of Old World familialism represented by Mother Camonte, whose role as the custodian of the family’s morality fails since she has a son who is a gangster and a daughter whom she cannot protect from her ‘no-good’ boy. Because of the repeated construction of the gangster as an Italian ethnic subject bearing the markers of an ethnicity to be feared for

The most famous improvised lines in the history of the movies are the ones Orson Welles came up with while playing Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949): “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.