All of Mario Soldati's films are of great interest for the craftsmanship of the director and his intimate if not professional sense of literature, and this film is no exception, as it is made on a short story by Graham Greene. A boy (Richard O'Sullivan) is sent to Venice to meet his father for the first time in three years, who is coming down to Venice from Trieste, a diplomat involved in refugee cases, but he never arrives to meet his son. Naturally the boy gets worried and mobilizes all kinds of possible helpers, where the chiefest one appears to be Alida Valli because of her boyfriend Joe (Richard Baseheart) who turns out to be the catcher in the rye. The father, who has been kidnapped for political reasons, is played by Trevor Howard, and he is miserable indeed as a drugged patient in a phoney doctor's fun house of so called patients with no possibility to reach his son. The mood of the film is very grey, although it is all in the splendid queen of beautiful cities Venice, but not much of its glory is shown here, but the film is closer to "Don't Look Now" some decades later with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland getting just as deep into trouble as Trevor Howard does here - it's the same kind of back side Venice with narrow stinking canals and dirty business going on. It is not on par with "The Third Man" and "The Man Between" of similar stories of destiny, but this film is actually more serious because of the boy in the lead - the main film is all about his concerns, which you can't help empathize with. To this comes a very gripping score by Nino Rota, and afterwards you must wonder about the character of the doctor - was he really as bad as all that, or was there possibly some reasonable good in him as well? That character (Eduardo Ciannelli) is the enigma of the tale and because of that the most interesting character, a most typical Graham Greene character.
