In Hot Water with Holden

The Counterfeit Traitor (Paramount). Oil, the Swedes remarked sadly in the fall of 1942, is thicker than blood. They were speaking of Eric Erickson, an American who came to Sweden in the '20s, did well in the oil business, took out Swedish citizenship. Then came the war. Erickson, like most neutrals, continued to do business with the Germans, but when he was put on the Allied blacklist his reaction was odious. He publicly insulted the country of his birth, openly frequented the German legation in Stockholm, made fulsome speeches praising the Fuehrer.

Sure enough, Erickson's public professions were simply a cover for his secret activities as an Allied agent. Those activities, depicted with approximate accuracy in a novel by Alexander Klein, have now been cleverly rejiggered to produce an expert and expensive ($4,500,000) spy thriller. Written and directed by George (The Bridges at Toko-ri) Seaton, Traitor describes how Erickson (William Holden) was shanghaied into espionage by the Allies, how he made "business trips" to Germany and reported what he saw and heard, how he came to hate the Nazis and to like his work, how he fell in love with a companion in espionage (Lilli Palmer), how he was betrayed by a nasty Nazi schoolboy but was rescued and smuggled to Sweden.

The picture is too long (2 hr., 20 min.), but it is also incessantly exciting, occasionally witty (wife describes philandering husband: "He told me I was one in a million and I discovered he was telling the truth") and in its exposition of organized sadism comparatively subtle. All too often Hollywood's Gestapo agents are popeyed, fat-necked baby peelers. Seaton's monsters look the way monsters usually look -- like everybody else.

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