Rent The Key (1958)

Deck the Halls - The Key review by CH

How should a film end? All too often, everything is tidied up with a clinch or a shoot-out (or both). Of course, there was doubt during the ad hoc filming of Casablanca about the way things would go at the aerodrome, and Graham Greene was at first reluctant for Carol Reed to have his way in the last minutes of The Third Man - and duly conceded that the director was emphatically right.

The thought comes to mind when Reed completed The Key, a decade after The Third Man. Its ending, steam and all, is of a piece with the better sections of a film which takes place within the confines of a tug boat at sea and a small, converted flat within a once-splendid house - with a staircase to behold - near the harbour.

It is 1941, with Christmas in the offing while U-boats and aeroplanes target those vessels that comprised the Atlantic Convoys. The tugs are waiting to aid any ship that comes a cropper, whether by rescuing the crews or dragging the holed vessel back to shore. As chance has it, William Holden, pre-Pearl Harbor, arrives to join the crew of one tug and re-encounters Trevor Howard, who invites him to the flat whose big brass bed he shares with sultry Stella (an early appearance by Sophia Loren) after being given a spare key to it by somebody who had told him to use it should he himself come a cropper. And now Howard does the same, urging it upon Holden.

There is a convincing claustrophobia - redolent of later kitchen-sink dramas - to these interior scenes, both Holden and Stella beset by differing insecurities as the camera ranges across the oddly cinemascope set-up. This widescreen is better suited to the scenes upon the ocean, which are done well enough but now appear of a piece with many a war film from those years rather than being anything imbued with the distinctive Reed touch.

For all the waves crashing upon decks and down tight, metal stairwells, it is often the small details that linger, such as a shop window which proclaims that it can removes hearts and names from those who have previously been tattoed there. Long before Meatfree Monday, the same was then urged on a Tuesday and Friday.

What endures is the passion and amorality combined in Stella (has Sophia Loren ever been as good, that is bad?). One is eager to seek out the original novel, named after her, by Jan de Hartog.

War Noir. - The Key review by Steve

Harrowing psychological drama about salvage crews operating in the North Atlantic in WWII, suffering what we now call PTSD. Their task is to rescue convoys which have been hit by u-boats, but with pitiful defences. The preface calls these suicide missions. Performed by men unable to process the horror.

Trevor Howard plays the captain of one of these beat up tugs. He's a fatalistic old boozer, surviving on adrenaline and sleeping pills. He is joined by William Holden, a more proactive skipper who presumes that an enterprising approach may delay the inevitable. They acquire the key to a waterfront room; a kind of allegorical purgatory.

While the action takes a realist approach, the crews who operate on the edge of death find their lives assume a mystical dimension. This is personified by Sophia Loren, a sort of delusional saint who comes with the room. She has cared for so many of these doomed men, that she can hardly tell them apart, numb from an overload of memory and loss.

Loren brings dignity to her difficult, spectral role. Holden is fine, but Howard is a natural in this dark, subliminal zone of fear and despair. After a decade of patriotic WWII memoirs, this is war as hell. Censorship issues muddled the final scenes and the metaphysical themes are inevitably vague, but this is an unusual and haunting war-noir.

A fascinating story. - The Key review by Maureen

This film is a wartime story of heroism with an unusual sub-plot. A lady (Sophia Loren) has an apartment which she shares, including her bed, with a succession of tug-boat captains sent out on virtual suicide missions to rescue the survivors of U-boat attacks. Each captain passes the key of the apartment to a friend before he perishes, as do they all. The cast is excellent, with Trevor Howard, William Nicholson and Sophia Loren in her most unglamorous part, with a very unusual but believable story. Well worth watching.

George R.