THE STRANGER'S HAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 873, 27 April 1956, Page 34

THE STRANGER'S HAND

(John Stafford-London Films) FLY a small boy from England to Italy for his holidays and let his father be kidnapped, for political reasons, while the child waits for him in a hotel bedroom and you have, shall we say, a situation of some human interest. For The Stranger’s Hand this one was worked out by Graham Greene and it has besides two other big names from The Third Man: Trevor Howard is the kidnapped father and Alida Valli a typist at the hotel who helps the boy to look for him. . Venice is the setting and Venice through the camera’s eye is alone enough to half-win my submissionVenice after dark especially, lit like the Vienna of Holly Martins, with an atmosphere that is haunting and right. In it the beautiful Miss Valli (here directed by Mario Soldati, who discovered her) is, of course, completely at home. She’s a refugee and, trying to forget the past, she can wish aloud she had never met the child, but knows she will help him when all she wants is to go off and meet her American boy friend, Joe Hamstringer. And Joe (Richard Basehart), who curses the boy when he spoils their date, later risks his life to help him.

The characters, you see, are roundly (greyly?) human, not a conventional, consistent black or white-even the vil-

lains, or one at any fate, a doctor (Eduardo Ciannelli), who is serving the kidnappers with hypodermic and drugs. An unforgettable character wonderfully realised, he conveys all the poignancy of the humane, kindly man whose devotion to an ideology obliges him to act inhumanly; and more than anyone else he brings to the film that something extra that we expect in a Graham Greene "entertainment." When, by accident, he finds the boy in the street, hears -his story and buys him an ice cream, the scene between them as they sit and talk in an open-air cafe is both moving and terrible. Trevor Howard gives another of his flawless performances (he is certainly among the actors I most admire), and young Richard O’Sullivan is completely convincing as the sad-eyed boy, alone or almost so, in a strange city and a stranger grown-up world. As a thriller The Stranger’s Hand is occasionally a little slow, but its other merits make up for that, and after seeing it twice I can vouch for its power to take hold of you and not let go.