When his father never appears at the airport to greet him, a young boy must search above and beneath the streets of Venice, with the help of a kind hotel employee who has problems of her own. This British-Italian co-production contains all the suspense and foreboding of Greene’s classic spy thrillers yet is modulated by the boy’s innocent gaze. The Stranger’s Hand had an improbable origin in Greene’s playfully anonymous entry of two chapters of an unwritten novel into a 1949 writing competition in the style of Graham Greene. He came in second, but was approached by Mario Soldati to continue the story, which Greene, gleefully in his deceit, wrote as a film treatment in the form of a novella. Soldati secured The Third Man’s Alida Valli and Trevor Howard to further saturate it in deepest Greene.

The HFA’s print is the original English-language release version of the film.