Sights and Smells of Vienna’s ‘Third Man’ Tour : Sewers play a major part in guided walk through city where classic film was made in 1949.

The sewer stank.

It was near the Donaukanal, the man-made strip of water that, fed by the big blue Danube, intersects and splits this imperial city. With its slippery cobblestone floor slick with oily crud and oozing mud, this particular sewer was the least likely place in Vienna to begin a sightseeing tour.

Yet 30 of us stood deep in the shadow of the foul-smelling tunnel, imagining Orson Welles being pursued through it by Trevor Howard, Joseph Cotten and the Austrian police. Although we had to breathe through tissues and shirt-sleeves, we were happy to be here--not because we liked sewers, but because we shared a mania for a 43-year-old movie.

There is only one city in the world where you can book “The Third Man” tour.

Take it after you’ve done Vienna’s Opera House and the palaces--the Hofburg and Schonbrunn--and St. Stephen’s Cathedral, after you’ve paid a visit to Freud’s apartment, strolled the Karntner Strasse and sipped a cafe melange at Demel. Or take it before.

Nowhere else but in Vienna can one see the doorway where the insidious Harry Lime first emerged from the shadows. Or the imposing Grecian statues outside the building where Lime kept a flat. Or the giant Ferris wheel where Lime delivered his treatise on people as disposable “dots.”

Or the sewers.

Of course, anyone in town with 100 schillings--about $9--can join up with “The Third Man” tour, but a caveat or two are in order. If you’ve seen the film or read Graham Greene’s novelization of his screenplay, enough said; you’re qualified. If not, there’s not a much better way to prepare for a Viennese visit than by renting the movie on video or reading the short book on the flight over.

That’s because Vienna is as much a part of this classic film as the actors and filmmakers who created it. Perhaps no European capital (except maybe Paris) is as evocative as Vienna. Rebuilding from the ruins of World War II, Vienna in 1948 had yet to shed its trappings of empire, its aura of royalty and Oriental intrigue, its Mixmaster politics. (Vienna at the time was quartered into zones and controlled by the Americans, the Russians, the British and the French.) In 1948, Vienna was more than an occupied city with a magnificent history: It was a made-to-order movie set.

“The Third Man” captured the city and the time. The Vienna of today basks in the ‘90s: McDonald’s on the corner, street hucksters in search of schillings who sing “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” and an ultra-modern subway. Yet visitors can slip into a time warp by calling the Vienna Tourist Board and asking for “Der Dritte Mann” walking tour.

We gathered on a warm, sunny Friday afternoon in late May at the Friedensbrucke U-Bahn subway station. Friedensbrucke, it turned out, was very close to the sewer.

About 30 of us met by the little bridge at 4 p.m. German was far and away the language of choice--only two Americans in the group--so our guide, a moon-faced, diminutive, bespectacled woman whose business card read “Dr. Friederike Mayr,” ordained that German would be the operative tongue. She assured the English speakers--myself and a woman from Minnesota--that she’d follow the German spiel with English details.

After introductions were made and the touring fee paid, we ambled down a slope by the canal as Mayr offered up tidbits about how “The Third Man” came to be. It seems that after the war, Vienna, with its ruins and mounds of rubble (13% of the city’s buildings were damaged or destroyed), was too enticing for film producer Alex Korda to ignore.

Korda, who was pals with Greene, sent him to Austria to prepare a treatment and a script. Greene, fully established by then as a major modern British writer, loved the movies, reviewed films as a young man and turned out novels that were effortlessly cinematic. The author took a room at the Sacher Hotel, strolled by the ruins and developed a story involving a naive American author of pulp Westerns, a beautiful Slavic actress and a black-market drug seller named Harry Lime.

The sewer, which figures in Lime’s demise near the end of the film, was decidedly uncharming. “Just like it was in the ‘40s,” said Dr. Mayr, speaking over the flushing water below our feet. During the filming of the chase scene, the young Welles, nauseated by working conditions, ordered that perfume and cologne be sprayed on the sewer walls.

“There’s another sewer where the film was shot, but unfortunately it’s closed to the public,” Mayr said. No one complained.

As we rode the U-Bahn to our next stop (to the Stadtpark and the Vienna River, where another part of the chase was filmed), our guide proudly told us that she had seen the movie five times. “Wie toll, “ uttered a young man with a goatee--”That’s great.”

When we emerged from the Karlsplatz station, just off the famous Ring road, Mayr led us to a covered manhole--where Lime made his final attempt to escape--and past the Sacher Hotel and the Cafe Mozart. The famous cafe provided the location for a crucial meeting between Holly Martins (Cotten) and Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch), a greasy character and one of Lime’s accomplices in his black-market scheme to sell diluted penicillin.

“The real cafe was bombed,” explained Mayr, “so they borrowed the sign and erected the coffeehouse in a nearby square.” A few steps onward we reached the Josefplatz and a doorway at No. 5, flanked by two towering, heroic statues. It was here (the address was Stiftgasse 15 in the film) that Lime kept a flat, and where he was supposedly struck down by a hit-and-run truck driver. “Nothing has changed,” said our guide.

Our little group was slightly worn by Mayr’s fast pace and the Vienna sun. Although the tour is a relatively short two hours, we covered a good deal of city. We rested in the square in front of the baroque Am Hof, the plaza where “Anna,” played by actress Alida Valli, lived. Then it was up Schottengasse to view the doorway where Lime makes his dramatic, shadowy entrance in the movie. The cat that leads the camera to Lime--by licking at his black shoes--was long gone.

As we sat on a stone wall across from the “set”--the tour was a wrap at this point--Mayr answered questions and then pulled out a loose-leaf book of movie stills from her bag, lovingly frayed despite their plastic envelopes. There were all the locations we’d visited, in black and white. Somehow the ‘40s version of Vienna looked more romantic.

GUIDEBOOK: ‘Third Man’ Tours in Vienna

If you go: The Vienna Tourist Board publishes a monthly list of events that usually includes dates and times for the “Vienna in the Footsteps of The Third Man” tour. It’s available at the tourist office, Karntner Strasse 38, around the corner from the Sacher Hotel.

Other tours: For a more complete list of walking tours, ask at the tourist office for the “Walks in Vienna” brochure. It lists a couple of dozen city walks given by the independent Vienna Tourist Guides. Besides “The Third Man,” other tour topics include “Amadeus in Vienna, Film and Reality,” “Vienna Upstairs and Downstairs” and “A Thousand Years of Jewish Tradition in Vienna.”

For more information: Contact the Austrian National Tourist Office, 11601 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 2480, Los Angeles 90025, (213) 477-3332.