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Friday, April 2, 2021

THE SECRET WAYS (1961)

Pretty good, if little known, Cold War suspenser (that title not much help), produced by its star, Richard Widmark, from Alastair MacLean’s novel.  Widmark a WWII vet, at ends in Vienna, yet to find his place in the post-war world and currently in serious debt.  Reason enough to take on an ill-defined/under-the-table government mission to get an anti-Communist resistance leader out of Hungary.  With little to go on other than a snapshot of the man’s daughter, he starts asking around and winds up over his head in intrigue even before taking the train to Budapest.  And once inside, things only get more complicated.  As producer, Widmark made a lot of smart decisions and one dumb one.  On the credit side: location, location, location, all real other than in Budapest; first-rate B-pic vet Phil Karlson to direct; memorable Euro-faces in support (Howard Vernon an exceptional sadistic interrogator); glistening noirish cobblestone atmosphere from lenser Mutz Greenbaum; jangly early score from ‘Johnny’ Williams.  On the debit side: Widmark hired wife Jean Hazelwood to do the script.  Oops!  And while it’s fine to be a bit lost in these espionage yarns, figuring things out along with our protagonist, here plot & motivations often too vague & ill-defined to follow & sort out.  Still, a fair amount of tension is built up along the way, and Karlson runs a dandy final action sequence, nicely extended with clever twists & sacrifices to keep it going.  They say ‘close’ only counts in horseshoes, but it works for espionage pics, too.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Next year, DR. NO/’62 made semi-serious espionage like this even harder to pull off. For a while, it was either campy/over-the-top James Bond or John Le Carré serious.

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