The Key

In England in 1941, lightly armed tugs go out into the Atlantic to salvage ships that have been hit by submarines, and the casualty rate is high. An American, David Ross, arrives to captain one of them. A fellow tug skipper hands him a key: the key to an apartment and to the young woman living in it. The rule is simple, if something happens to him, the key passes to Ross. Carol Reed finds the most frightening part of the war not at sea but in that key: a woman's life treated as an object handed on from one dead man to the next. Sophia Loren plays her and William Holden the man who steps into the arrangement and cannot get comfortable in it. It is adapted from Jan de Hartog's novel. Trevor Howard, as the friend, carries the first half of the film.