The Stranger's Daughter

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 treatment 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. Greene used a pseudonym to enter the first two chapters of The Stranger's Hand in a competition organized by the New Statesman which called for submissions in the style of Graham Greene. His entry won second prize. Soldati saw the chapters and persuaded Greene to complete the story to serve as the basis for a film. Greene expanded it to 30 pages of a "film story", and Giorgio Bassani and Guy Elmes used Greene's work as the basis for their screenplay. In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther enjoyed the film's use of situations and themes typical of Greene, but thought Soldati allowed the story to "sag like a slack rope".