Austria on Screen: The Third Man's Vienna and The Sound of Music's Lake

Austria's two great hotel films could not be further apart in tone: one a shadowy noir set in a bombed, divided city, the other the most cheerful musical Hollywood ever made. Both are among the most celebrated films of all time.

Hotel Sacher Wien: The Third Man (1949)

Carol Reed's The Third Man follows Joseph Cotten's pulp novelist Holly Martins, who arrives in post-war Vienna to find that his old friend Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, has apparently been killed. Shot on location in a city still split between four occupying powers, the film makes Hotel Sacher, behind the State Opera, Holly's hotel. In the story it's a British military hotel, where the military police put him up after Lime's funeral, and that's close to the truth: after the war the Sacher was run as a British officers' club. Graham Greene stayed there in February 1948, heard the story of Vienna's black market in penicillin over lunch with a young British intelligence officer, and began writing the script at the hotel.

The Third Man won the Grand Prix at the 1949 Cannes Film Festival, the BAFTA for Best British Film and the Academy Award for Best Black-and-White Cinematography, and its zither theme by Anton Karas became an international hit.

The hotel is, of course, also home of the original Sachertorte, the chocolate cake created by Franz Sacher in 1832. The recipe is still a secret.

Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron: The Sound of Music (1965)

Several of the film's most famous moments were shot at Schloss Leopoldskron, the 1736 rococo palace on a lake on the edge of Salzburg, though not quite in the way the tour buses suggest. The palace's owners at the time wouldn't allow filming, so the production built replicas of its lakeside terrace and its seahorse gates on the neighbouring Meierhof estate. That's where the von Trapps drink pink lemonade on the terrace, where Maria and the Captain argue by the water, and where Maria and the children capsize their rowing boat into the lake as the Captain comes home. The palace's gilded Venetian Room was copied for the family's ballroom on a Hollywood soundstage. Julie Andrews played Maria and Christopher Plummer the Captain, and the film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

The happy ending is that the Meierhof is now part of the hotel. The palace and the Meierhof opened together as Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron in 2014, and three of the Meierhof's rooms are Sound of Music-themed. The palace was once owned by theatre director Max Reinhardt, a founder of the Salzburg Festival, and is also home to the Salzburg Global Seminar.