It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The latter reviews do not mention Sophia Loren's electrifying performance, partnered by the ever-excellent William Holden. The direction is subtle at first, but as the film gains in intensity the camera starts moving in a 3 D manner, it was shot in CinemaScope, and the action takes you into the relationship, adulterous and complex, as the ships begin to list, dive into the waves as they come at them, spewing salt water as in a Tsunami, without let up, and the love between Holden and Sophia Loren dives along with the oceanic activities, creating a kind of bedlam of emotions and expressed feelings. The world has many weapons to use against this couple, and it can strike from all sides and does. The key is perhaps the worst object and yet the best object either of them can possess. A must from Carol Reed who gave us The Third Man.

William Holden's last black and white movie is now rarely shown on TV and is not currently available on DVD. A CinemaScope movie, superbly photographed by Ossie Morris, it didn't sit at all well on our old-fashioned TV receivers and is not likely to be revived now because it is not in color. Yet Reed, Morris and art director Wilfrid Shingleton have lavished all the care of Croesus into creating atmospheric, brilliantly realistic compositions that superlatively capture the bleakness, the horror, the pettiness, the resigned helplessness of war-torn England. Although he has a fondness for close-ups, Reed brilliantly utilizes the full width of the screen so dramatically that cropping not only dissipates interest but leads to confusion because of the loss of essential detail. Admittedly, the original ending with its stark black and white images at the railroad station was restored in TV transmissions, but that was not enough to compensate for the image losses beforehand. Reed was always a director with a keen eye for tightly dramatic compositions. In fact, in my opinion, his visual acumen was second to none in British cinema.

"The key" (1958) directed by Carol Reed was a kind of room service for a lady, waiting for an impossible repetition of an unexpected love affair with a marine officer in mission during 1941. There is here of course in backwardness a kind of smooth feeling influenced by the circumstances of a closed spirit for a locked place, bringing together the necessity of putting two characters as inevitable partners of disgrace facing events. This movie is still with glamor, slightly out of date, and however like in the middle of life age, by the vacation of a loved one whom is plenty of souvenirs. When, suddenly, imaginative mind turns it in happy reality for the waiting woman, like Penelope, with other solutions for her flesh ambition. Carol Reed was here in a certain period where given this kind of story, it was considered as a mere episode of other movies from the time, because of that and also as less intimate and delicate for the same era and history than from others of the kind from then.Notwithstanding, on contrary, it is still a melancholic and extremely interesting symbol of fidelity, honor and willingness in black and white. This is a true love story of an officer and gentleman at the time where television was an adjourned adventure for the post war era and it seems that this kind of story came out in production when television language was still there for the concurrence with cinema and theater play. It's enough for understanding why the most part of daily activity as they were there in the flat, it was boring for nothing than humanizing their own feelings during a time whose main activity between the scale of missions it was talking about themselves and erosion of middle ages respectively. Carol Reed made a plausible movie about good acquaintance among fellows of the navy, concerning an enjoyable concealed place for sentimental encounters of intimate meaning with an available woman during a short pause of wartime and shows us the common behavior of this kind of warriors, as though they went with their sister's friend. Sharing their feelings as all friends of the same pretty and distinguished young woman with enough maturity for understanding the current problem of isolated souls, coming alive from the last battle and waiting for the next in their adventurous lives. A woman who waits for something more of special than more an adventure of heart among them, so that in such as searching the twin soul without any reason for being hopeful, meanwhile arrives the man of her life at that moment of break, in which she condenses her own hope now in a transitory period, where it is improbable to say if the next day is still possible to repeat the same happiness of the happening with the noise of the key opening the room of both.

An extraordinary movie in every way, from the combat scenes, which are so lifelike as virtually to constitute a documentary, to the superb acting by every single member of the cast, including each of the supporting players. But the very highest praise must go to Sophia Loren's absolutely stunning performance (not to mention her uncanny command of English at so early an age). Her quiet, dignified, and restrained interpretation of her very unusual and extremely demanding role is simply in a class by itself. I have never been able to get her graceful performance out of my mind. This is one of those movies of great merit, bewitched from the start, that simply disappear from public and critical consciousness---never to be recalled or mentioned even when, for example, the careers of Loren, Holden, or Trevor Howard are discussed. It is as if it were never made at all. A great shame.