It is ubiquitous to state that the United States emerged from the Second World War as the international superpower but the wider effects on film history were socio-economic. In an economy lifted out of the Depression by the war and readjusting to peace in an evolving Cold War context, the industry enjoyed the last significant boom before facing a crisis in the 1950s. To begin with, the studios continued to enjoy the boom they had had during the war with film comedy, as when Paramount's Bob Hope saved Madeleine Carroll from Nazi spies in My Favorite Blonde (1942). In the postwar years his winning comic formula was copied by Red Skelton and the most popular postwar comic Danny Kaye. RKO's The Bells of St Mary's starring Ingrid Bergman and Bing Crosby was the studio's biggest success ever in 1945 and conflict itself proved a creative force with the most successful postwar films at the box office drawing on the war as a catalyst for drama, as in Britain with David Lean's almost-love story Brief Encounter (1945) and Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). Starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard, Reed's story of postwar racketeering, murder and intrigue was internationally acclaimed and remains iconic in its visualisation of war-torn Vienna augmented by the haunting zither playing of Anton Karas.