Derring-Documentary

The Secret Ways (Heath; U-l), from the thriller novel by Scotland's Alistair MacLean, is, like most of his works (H.M.S. Ulysses, The Guns of Navarone), a derring-documentary that celebrates courage-for-a-cause. Hero Richard Widmark starts out believing that "everybody's learned to live by compromise," changes his mind after he and the audience have spent 112 minutes of sadism, gunplay, torture, capture and escape, cliffhanging, ledge-crawling, escape and capture. It is easily the most relentless movie chase since The Great Train Robbery.

Skull-faced Actor Widmark plays a carefree American "adventurer for hire" who is offered $60,000 by the head of an international spy ring. He is to go into Budapest and whisk out a man wanted by the Hungarian government: Walter Rilla, a scholarly, idealistic anti-Communist who smuggles enemies of the state across the border into Austria. The story, filmed in Austria, Switzerland and England, turns on how Widmark finds Rilla while dodging the Hungarian secret police and the Russian army of occupation. Widmark also dallies with Picasso-eyed Sonja Ziemann, who plays Rilla's doughty daughter.

For a hackle-raising reel or so, the good guys are whiplashed, stomped on and strapped to chairs in a steamy cell of the impregnable Szarhaza prison. Their efforts to fight off insanity from mind-obliterating drugs are compellingly chronicled. Their subsequent prison break is skillful skulduggery, handled in the finest tradition of cinema suspense. Director Phil (Hell to Eternity) Karlson and Star-Producer Widmark have managed to take a script that is awash in cliches, plunge it into an authentic setting, surround it with sound historical and technical data, and photograph it with an admirable tightness and edgy excitement.

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