The Stranger's Hand (1953)

Original title

La mano dello straniero

Directed by

Mario Soldati

Genre

drama film

Country

United Kingdom, Italy

Runtime

1h 38m

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 5 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A British boy's father is a MI5 agent who gets kidnapped in Venice by Yugoslavian spies. The boy sets out to find his missing father.

suspensefulmoodygrittytenseslow-burnatmosphericgloomymelancholic

What happens

The Stranger's Hand (Italian: La mano dello straniero) is a 1954 British-Italian thriller drama film directed by Mario Soldati and starring Trevor Howard, Alida Valli and Richard Basehart. An international co-production, it is based on the draft novel with the same name written by Graham Greene. The plot follows the son of a British MI5 agent kidnapped in Venice by agents of Yugoslavia as he searches for his father. The first two chapters of The Stranger's Hand had been entered by Greene anonymously under a pseudonym to a competition in the New Statesman to write a book in the style of Graham Greene – a competition in which Greene was amused to win second prize. Soldati had seen the chapters and persuaded Greene to complete the novella to make the basis for a film. Greene expanded it to 30 pages of a "film story", on which Giorgio Bassani and Guy Elmes completed the screenplay. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

More like this

• La corda d'acciaio (1953)
• The Yellow Balloon (1953)
• Cavallina storna (1953)
• Riscatto (1953)
• The Steel Key (1953)
• I Piombi di Venezia (1953)
• Soli per le strade (1953)
• The Man from Cairo (1953)