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Little-known but fascinatingly dark, perverse, melancholy Carol Reed film, based on a Jan de Hartog novel and adapted by Carl Foreman. The setting is the high seas of World War 2, early in 1941. Canadian merchant mariner David Ross (William Holden) arrives in England to take over an ocean-going tug, in a time when that occupation was obscenely dangerous, dodging German aircraft and submarines in trying to rescue torpedo-crippled ships.
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Ross links up with pre-War chum Chris Ford (Trevor Howard), also a tug captain, and is soon initiated into a peculiar brotherhood of other officers – all of them, except for Ford, dead – who have passed along the key to an apartment, within which lives Stella (Sophia Loren), a Swiss refugee. She’s been in hiding since being presumed to have died in an air raid, listlessly giving herself out along with the flat to a succession of men. The flat is itself as precious as Loren for being a decent living space, when otherwise sailors have to sleep in fetid hovels.
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The film’s sense of War-time port life is suitably gamy. Howard and Holden bounce each-other marvellously, Howard particularly brilliant as a stalwart chap slowly going to pieces and leaning on Stella despairingly. An air of faintly supernatural menace hangs about Stella (there is even the hint in her name, evocative of “Stella Marinus”); is she a cursed siren, and can she really sense when the men who pass into her room and arms are going to die? Ford’s eventual death at sea seems to confirm this, and Ross, loaded with self-loathing and booze, berates Stella as a whore, but can’t resist eventually using the key. There’s an unspoken kinship between the dangerous but essentially humanitarian ardousness of the tug crews’ efforts to safe ships and their crews, and Stella’s careless embrace of any man who needs a safe harbour.
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But something strange happens: rather than drifting on in the same anomie, Ross and Stella fall in love, and Stella ventures out of the flat for the first time in months, signalling, both hope, something like regeneration. But threat still lingers, as Ross discovers that his and other tugs are being deliberately used as training targets by U-Boat commanders.
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Reed is often dismissed as a cinematic mechanic who got lucky with two ‘40s classics of bleary anti-romanticism, Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949). His patchy subsequent career is nonetheless interesting, like the weird circus melodrama Trapeze (1953), and The Key confirms his continuing efforts to grapple with messy human relations within genre prisms, and an interest in the observation that some variations and definitions of courage can be mutually exclusive. The heroes of Odd Man Out, The Third Man, Trapeze, and The Key are brave in terms of their physical prowess, or their social beliefs and attempts to act on them, but are also cowards, or at least failures, in the private universes (later, in his underrated historical pageant The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), he tackled precisely the incompatibility between life and ideal). Just as Anna despises Holly in The Third Man for choosing a larger good over a private friendship, so in the end of The Key Ross, who has disclaimed belief in curses, finally loses Stella for passing the key along to friend (Kieron Moore).
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The film seems initially set up to confirm a traditional, cheesy Hollywood-Christian morality: a Dutch fellow tug captain (Oscar Homolka) leads a church choir and warns Ross that Stella will destroy him. But in fact it is Holden’s failure to hold onto his lack of credulity, to reject imposed morality and fear of fate, that finally condemns him. Where for Stella he held the promise of breaking a cycle, he falls victim to it. Though he triumphs in a thundering climax where he rams the U-Boat that’s been his black nemesis throughout the film, he returns home to discover he’s actually failed in the worst way. The final scene then very much reflects Reed’s delight in setting up sentimental clinches and then demolishing the promise, as Ross’s rush to catch Stella at the railway station proves too late.
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Excellently shot (by Oswald Morris), well-acted, and affecting in its dour, off-beat soul, The Key is a largely unsung gem.
