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Louise Scobie (Elizabeth Allan), the wife, is a species of clinging vine; her husband has not cut her loose because he pities her, and feels "a sense of responsibility for what she has become." Pity and the sense of responsibility have become the quiet passions of Scobie's quiet life.
Then one day Scobie falls in love with a 19-year-old girl (Maria Schell). Their raptures are brief. The heat, the secrecy, the difference in their ages, the knowing that they can never marry-all these things tell on their nerves. In the end, blackmailed by the villain, who has intercepted a love letter, Scobie is driven to crime in order to protect his wife from the knowledge that he loves another. And haunting him every moment is the sense that two women now, not just one, hold him to blame, as Scobie blames himself, for their unhappiness. A crime against Heaven, added to his crimes against men, seals Scobie's fate. He takes Communion, while in mortal sin, in order to hide that mortal sin from his wife. With the despair of the damned, he determines to commit suicide. "God, condemn me!" he cries. "But give rest unto them!" The ironies that ricocheted so savagely through Greene's final pages are all forsaken in the film for a pitifully sleazy out; just as Scobie is about to do himself in, the job is done for him by some brawling blacks.
The failure at the finish, however, is less important than a blunder at the beginning: the picture does not teach the audience to feel how Scobie feels about God, and until the spectator has that experience, he cannot experience the tragedy in its religious depths. What can be grasped, what is intensely set forth, is the tragedy of a man who is cursed with pity—the "folly" so terrible, in Nietzsche's pagan view, that it had killed God Himself.
Seldom has a film expounded an abstract entity with such heart-wringing concreteness. Trevor Howard as Scobie is pity in the flesh; and, moreover, a spectator gets the sense that he is not one aspect of the hero in one scene, and another in another, but the whole man at every moment. Vienna-born Maria Schell, playing her third role in English, is just right as the young girl. She shows innocence, lustiness, angelic grace and moral crassness in just the proportions that might tempt a fellow of Scobie's age and situation.
Whatever his mistakes, Director George More O'Ferrall can take credit, with Cameraman Jack Hildyard, for a powerful use of the camera to catch a mood. Hard and clear as the Syrian villain's eye, the frame takes in a stupefied huddle of tropical port: the tiny, eyeless box-buildings, the hot grey roads, the depraved palms, the dirty water that slides about the harbor. Beneath every scene is the sense of the black human jungle waiting to swallow all importance, and down upon everything blasts the terrible sun, like a pagan god who has come too near and made human life unbearable.