Cinema: Derring-Documentary

The Secret Ways (Heath; U-l), from the thriller novel by Scotland's Alistair MacLean, is, like most of his works (H.M.S. Ulysses, The Guns of Navarone), a derring-documentary that celebrates courage-for-a-cause. Hero Richard Widmark starts out believing that "everybody's learned to live by compromise," changes his mind after he and the audience have spent 112 minutes of sadism, gunplay, torture, capture and escape, cliffhanging, ledge-crawling, escape and capture. It is easily the most relentless movie chase since The Great Train Robbery.

Skull-faced Actor Widmark plays a carefree American "adventurer for hire" who is...

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