The New Pictures

The Law and Jake Wade (MGM) is a horse opera of another color. Metro-color is what they call it, and it sure is loud. There is probably nothing more than gold in them thar hills, but to look at the screen, anybody might think there was neon. Still, the Sierra Nevada, in which much of the film was shot, is pretty hard to spoil. Its purple mountain majesties look down in mineral calm upon what is probably the most stupendous avalanche of cliches to roll across the screen since the last major western was released.

The rolling stone that starts it all is The Good Guy (Robert Taylor)--he's the one with the prettiest horse--who is about to marry The Girl (Patricia Owens) --she's the one with the gingham dress--when they are kidnaped by The Bad Guy (Richard Widmark)--he's the one with the occupational sneer--who forces them to lead him to The Buried Treasure. First they cross The Bad Lands, then they encounter The Bluecoats, later they come to The Ghost Town, finally they are attacked by The Indians--a tribe of cosmetic Comanches who bite the dust as delicately as though it were crepes suzette. At the climax, The Good Guy and The Bad Guy shoot it out to supply the answer to the second most important question the picture poses: Who is faster on The Draw? Nobody seems to know the answer to the most important question: Why is Robert Taylor, a man of considerable general culture, content to spend most of his working hours grubbing around in the bottom of the oatbin?

The Key (Highroad; Columbia) is that most unexpected and moving utterance of the commercial muse: a true myth. Set down with crude force by Jan de Hartog in Book I of his 1952 novel, The Distant Shore, the myth has been clarified and rationalized with a masterly sense of symbolic logic by Scriptwriter-Producer Carl (High Noon) Foreman and Director Carol (Trapeze) Reed. On the surface, the film seems little different from a hundred other stories of men in war and women in love--except perhaps in the finesse of the witty and suspenseful writing and editing. But just beneath the surface can be glimpsed the glinting corpus of a hero myth--the story of the fight with a dragon, the release of a captive, the awakening of a sleeping beauty. And in its depths the narrative circles down through an abyss of symbols to the first and final circle of reality in which heaven and hell, good and evil, life and death go round together blindly in the mystery of the eternal return.

The hero (William Holden) is the captain of a British "suicide tug." assigned in the early years of World War II to rescue freighters that have been torpedoed but not sunk in the sea roads that converge on Britain. Guns are in such short supply that the tugs must put to sea unarmed except for some futile pom-poms of antique design. They are sitting ducks for the U-boats that usually lie in wait for rescue parties, and even if a captain should survive the shelling, he is pretty sure to succumb to the inhuman strain of fighting without weapons. Suicide is commonplace; Veronal is universal; strong drink is raging.

But one of the captains (Trevor Howard) has discovered a more pleasurable avenue to oblivion (Sophia Loren). It troubles him, of course, that others have traveled the same road before him, and that the road has always led to the grave. The first of Sophia's lovers was a tugboat skipper too, and one day he confided an extra key to his flat to another skipper, and asked him to look out for the girl if ever his luck ran out. So when the first skipper bought it, the second moved in, and after the second the third, and after the third the hero. As in the old religions of fertility, the male dies and is replaced, but the female is always the same--Astarte in a garret.

The hero's task in the myth is fearfully clear. He must resist what De Hartog calls "the terrible pull of the dead." He must interrupt the faceless generations of desire and break out of the vegetative rhythm of the female world in which he is really just a nobody, a term in an interminable series, a face in a crowd. He must establish himself as an individual and as a man, and he must force the female to become a woman by altering her blind instinctual feelings into human love.

All this is beautifully expressed in the film in a language of symbol--The Key, The Wedding Ring, The Marriage with Death, The Sea, The Enemy, The Fight, The Stairs, The Tree of Life--in which the grammar is parsed out to the least detail. The symbols are submerged in the flow of the story, and most moviegoers will not specially notice them; but they are there, and like glands of meaning, they secrete into this film the forces that make it, despite the indifferent performances of all the principals except Trevor Howard, one of the year's most strongly and strangely affecting pictures.

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