The Key

William Holden - David Ross
Sophia Loren - Stella
Trevor Howard - Chris Ford
Oskar Homolka - Van Dam
Kieron Moore - Kane
Bernard Lee - Wadlow
Beatrix Lehmann - Housekeeper
Noel Purcell - Porter
Bryan Forbes - Weaver

In the mid 1950s, the American screenwriter Carl Foreman, whose credits included High Noon and Champion, found himself blacklisted and had to earn his living by writing anonymously. In the late 1950s, he was at last able to persuade Columbia Pictures to finance film properties which he would not only write under his own name but also produce. Foreman, who fancied himself a highbrow, wanted to christen his resurrected career with a blue ribbon production rather than the standard escape fare which, for the most part, had been his forte.

His choice was The Key, adapted from Stella, Jan De Hartog's Second World War novella about the extraordinarily courageous tugboats that went to the aid of stricken cargo ships. The story appealed to Foreman for a number of reasons. As a Second World War veteran himself, he could readily identify with the subject-matter. Moreover, De Hartog's novel offered an attractive symmetry between crowd-pleasing action sequences and a spectrum of eerie, allegorical features. The Dutch hero would, of course, be converted to an American and the part would go to a major star, so as to satisfy the domestic audiences; but at the same time, the story's European flavour, and its rousing testimonial to the naval heroism of the British and the Dutch, would make the film appealing to Europeans. The final insurance policy for The Key would be to hire a distinguished European director, though not an overly arty one, someone, who could add the cachet of his name to the film without diminishing its box office potential. In short, someone like Sir Carol Reed.

The film's components fall to cohere, though individually some are praiseworthy. Much of the difficulty lies in the original material, which simply resists even the best efforts of a Carol Reed. The core of De Hartog's story is the surreal tragedy of Stella, an English girl whose lover, a tugboat captain, perished in a rescue attempt. After his death, another seaman shows up at Stella's apartment and, instead of sending him away, she elects to replace her dead lover with this newcomer. Since the mortality rate of tugboat captains is extremely high, Stella's apartment is soon a revolving door of lovers. Although warm and animated towards each of these men, she clearly sees them uniformly, as symbols of something abstract, not personal. The love story alternates with thrilling, authoritatively detailed accounts of naval rescue operations, and at last one of these brings the hero to a fateful reckoning. Attacked by a Nazi submarine, the hero rams into it and somehow survives. Realising that it was the 'innocence' of the rescue-oriented tugboat commanders that made Stella 'love us all as if we were one' and that he has now 'joined the murderers', he reluctantly surrenders his key to another man. Later he has a change of heart and rushes to Stella's apartment, where his terrifying presence - he is now an agent of the reality from which Stella is protecting herself induces hysteria. She leaves for London and the hero's final, crushing disillusionment comes when he learns that the woman he loved, apparently restored to sanity, is calmly writing to a boyfriend back home.

Foreman's screenplay hews pretty closely to the novel and is flat-footed throughout, achieving a measure of evocativeness only where there are nuances to be seized from the original text. In other films, Reed had made a speciality of unusual, captivating prologues, cinematically swift introductions that presented theme and subject as atmospherically as possible. It's impossible to know whether he had something better in mind than what Foreman's script calls for - a shot of Holden (David Ross), newly arrived in England to assist the British rescue teams, walking through the local shipyards. The contrast in scale between the immensity of the shipyards and the minuteness of a single man is pointless since there is no thematic use for it in the movie, which deals with the crew and commanders of very small boats. Immediately afterwards, Ross encounters an old friend, Captain Chris Ford (Trevor Howard), and Foreman lamely funnels as much exposition through the scene as he can.

We learn that the tugs are considered the Red Cross of the sea, that their work is fraught with danger, that Ross is an American serving with the Canadian forces because the United States has not yet entered the war. And so it goes for the remainder of Foreman's scenario as the characters meet, celebrate Christmas, part company, love and fight and die. At the heart of the tale is the enigmatic Stella (Sophia Loren), the dark lady of the sea, whose lovers all experience an intuition of their coming demise and pass the key to her apartment along to another man. At the beginning of the movie, she is Chris's fiancée, but a few scenes later he is dead and Ross has inherited the key and the woman who goes with it. The psychological tension in the movie stems from the battle between Ross's fearful suspicion that Stella has no loyalty to anyone and his growing love for her. Embarking on an especially perilous assignment, he commits a terrible breach of faith by giving Stella's key to a fellow seaman (Kieron Moore). The subsequent action sequence, in which Ross rams the submarine and escapes destruction himself, is as thrilling - and far-fetched - as it was in the book.

In the film's denouement, with Ross trying desperately to recapture his beloved, Foreman goes deep into the Hollywood ragbag for a scene of Stella's train pulling out of the station, headed for London, with Ross making a frantic sprint to overtake it. The film was originally released in America with an ending poised somewhere between ambiguity and sorrow: failing to catch up with the train, Ross vows to find Stella in London. This is the conclusion that European audiences saw. In the United States, however, a happy ending was inserted after the first week or so, and the hero and heroine are reunited.

Apart from its scenes of victory - and defeat - at sea, the most vital and absorbing aspects of The Key are the carefully modulated intimations of doom that Reed is sometimes able to generate. The hangers rattle in Stella's closet, as if the ghosts of her deceased officers were putting their coats away. Equally spectral is the gigantic shadow cast by her phone, over which so many fateful messages have come. In the film's most creepily suggestive scene, and one of the few to convey the dark poetry that Foreman and Reed strove for, Stella follows Ross to the docks when he is leaving on an especially dangerous mission, although he has ordered her not to. As he sees it, she will be repeating the actions that preceded Ford's death, and he has grown acutely sensitive to omens. Stella follows him anyway, and Reed's camera catches haunting glimpses of her through Ross's terrified eyes, as she glides along a railing above him, a black-clad figure, resonantly ambiguous, combining messages of love with omens of death, a perfect personification of Liebesrod. If only Reed could have injected more imagery like this into Foreman's flat uninflected screenplay.