Fake penicillin, The Third Man, and Operation Claptrap.

Journal article

Abstract:: Paul Newton and Brigitte Timmermann uncover the murky truth that inspired Graham Greene’s film and highlight a continuing problem.
The Third Man is a wonderfully evocative, innovative, and fascinating film, set in the ruins and chaos of post-war Vienna. Released in 1949, it was directed by Carol Reed with the screenplay by Graham Greene. It describes the tortuous chase and grisly subterranean death of the fake penicillin smuggler Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles. Lime’s falsified penicillin results in the death or hospital admission of many Viennese children. To vanish from the police, Lime fakes his own death by having a co-conspirator run over and buried as himself. However, a school friend of Lime, Holly Martins, arrives in Vienna to see Harry and, suspicious that the accident was murder, starts his own amateur investigation—only to be surprised to find Harry still alive in the shadows of nocturnal Vienna. Reluctantly, Martins is recruited to the entrapment of Lime, after being shown evidence of his heinous crimes by Major Calloway, a Royal Armoured Corps intelligence officer, played by Trevor Howard.
How did Graham Greene arrive at this unusual and moving pharmaceutical story, that sadly still has so much public health relevance for today? There are multiple fascinating and rather bizarre threads.

Files:: bmj.i6494.full.pdf

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Copyright holder:: Newton and Timmermann
Notes:: © Newton et al 2016. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, w.

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