It's both surprising and disappointing that this 1958 film has been virtually forgotten. If for no other reason than the amount of talent involved in its making, it deserves continuing recognition. The script, for example, came from Carl Foreman, (adapted from a Jan de Hartog novel),Sir Carol Reed directed, Malcolm Arnold provided the score and Oswald Morris photographed in black-and-white CinemaScope. Heading the cast are William Holden, just fading from his #1 status, and Sophia Loren, just nearing her #1 status. Trevor Howard provides fine support.
Despite all these assets, however, the movie doesn't quite take off. It's consistently interesting but never really engrossing. Scenes alternate between wartime action in the Atlantic and domestic drama inside a small apartment but neither aspect of the movie seems to provide it with a solid core. It all somehow seems a bit tentative and slightly oblique.
Michael Caine is said to play a small part here. William Holden has a brief shirtless scene which indicates, at the time of filming, he was still in his shaved-chest mode.
The Key
1958
Action / Drama / Romance / War
The Key
1958
Action / Drama / Romance / War
Keywords: world war iitugboat
Plot summary
During World War II, tugboats conduct what are called salvage missions, picking up disabled ships. Not well equipped with weaponry, the tugs are sitting ducks for enemy fire. As such, the crew working the tugs have precarious lives, many with deep seated emotional problems. Before the Americans join the war, ex-American military man David Ross is assigned to captain a tug for the British military. He is shown the ropes by an old friend, Captain Chris Ford. Chris currently shares a flat with a young beautiful Italian-Swiss woman named Stella, who came with the flat and who lives a reclusive life there. Chris is the latest in a long line of tugboat Captains who have lived there, each who has found another person to take over the flat and the associated looking after of Stella if anything is to happen to him. That person is given a key to the flat, the key only to be used if needed. The first in the series was Phillip Westerby, to whom Stella was to be married before Phillip was killed. Chris, who, in turn, now loves Stella and wants to marry her, asks David to be the next in line. David reluctantly agrees. As David learns the pressures associated with his work, he begins also to understand the emotional turmoil that Stella has gone through, which changes his opinion about "the key". Stella's view of the key also changes with David.
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Lots of talent but modest results
Where is "The Key" now?
William Holden's last black and white movie is now rarely shown on TV and is not currently available on DVD. A CinemaScope movie, superbly photographed by Ossie Morris, it didn't sit at all well on our old-fashioned TV receivers and is not likely to be revived now because it is not in color. Yet Reed, Morris and art director Wilfrid Shingleton have lavished all the care of Croesus into creating atmospheric, brilliantly realistic compositions that superlatively capture the bleakness, the horror, the pettiness, the resigned helplessness of war-torn England. Although he has a fondness for close-ups, Reed brilliantly utilizes the full width of the screen so dramatically that cropping not only dissipates interest but leads to confusion because of the loss of essential detail. Admittedly, the original ending with its stark black and white images at the railroad station was restored in TV transmissions, but that was not enough to compensate for the image losses beforehand. Reed was always a director with a keen eye for tightly dramatic compositions. In fact, in my opinion, his visual acumen was second to none in British cinema.
Was Sophia a Jinx?
This is a curious film. A gritty, tough realistic movie during the action sequences at sea, but when the story shifts to land and Sophia Loren and the men her life, it's dull and lifeless.
Trevor Howard and Bill Holden are men numbers three and four in refugee Sophia Loren's life. The key is the key to her apartment which the guys make duplicates of and pass on to friends. Right after that's done, the giver is killed at sea.
Howard and Holden are tugboat captains assigned to tugs who go out to the open sea and pick up crippled freighters bringing needed war supplies to Great Britain during World War II and tow them in. The tugs are poorly armed and barely sea worthy and are easy marks for the
Germans. It's hard tough work and director Carol Reed does a superb job showing that. This is one of the least glamorized war movies I've ever seen. The men are fatalistic to say the least, but especially around Sophia as if the Nazis weren't enough to worry about.
Sophia Loren is a lovely thing of beauty and certainly a pleasure to watch, but her scenes with her two male co-stars have absolutely no spark at all.
If you watch this I recommend you fast forward the romance and get to the action.