If Harry Lime, the villain from Carol Reed‘s 1949 British film noir The Third Man, were a food obsessive, as was Orson Welles, the actor who portrayed and embellished the Graham Greene creation, than one of the most famous lines in cinema history might have read somewhat differently:

LIME:  In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced lasagna, ravioli, risotto, mozzarella di bufala, pecorino romano and pollo alla cacciatora. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? Fondue.

In fact it was Welles who improvised what is known as the cuckoo clock speech. The backdrop was postwar Vienna and Welles apparently did not have pasta on his mind at the time. No, if you watch the scene closely and mute the dialogue you just might get a glimmer of  Welles’s preoccupation. I think he’s secretly wondering where he will go that night for  tafelspitz and sacher torte.