The Key Details

Playing down her usual voluptuous glamour, Sophia Loren is heartbreakingly vulnerable in this adaptation of Jan De Hartog's novel, Stella. As the waterfront landlady who offers her favours to naval skippers, she is both a source of solace and disquiet, as few entrusted with her key survive for long. Instead of focusing on either her torment or her affair with the gruff William Holden, Carl Foreman's script spends too much time at sea. No matter how well director Carol Reed stages the action sequences, we're soon impatient for shore leave.

Rather foolish symbolic melodrama which never makes its purpose clear but along the way provides fragments of love story, chunks of the supernatural and dollops of war action, rather languidly assembled with great technical competence but little real feel