Immediately after World War 2 and the horrors of the holocaust the British government found itself in a difficult situation. On the one hand, it had promised the Jewish people the right to return to their ancient homeland in Palestine. The problem was that the Arab nations had no intention of allowing that to happen. That being said, this film essentially begins in Cypress with an American woman by the name of "Catherine 'Kitty' Fremont" (Eva Marie Saint) having lunch with the British commander in charge of detaining a large number of Jewish refugees there pending a determination as to whether to allow them to continue on to Palestine. During the course of their meeting "General Sutherland" (Ralph Richardson) learns that Ms. Fremont is a nurse and offers her a chance to check out the nearby field hospital. She eventually accepts and during that time meets a young girl named "Karen" (Jill Haworth) who captures her interest enough to ask the general whether she can adopt her. Unbeknownst to her, a radical leader of a Zionist movement named "Ari Ben Canaan" (Paul Newman) has come upon a plan to remove a large number of Jewish detainees from the camp and place them on a nearby ship to transport them to Palestine-and Karen is one of those refugees. Naturally, this creates a problem for both Catherine Fremont and General Sutherland which is only exacerbated when Ari Ben Canaan threatens to blow the ship up and kill everybody if the British government tries to board the ship while in harbor. Now rather than reveal any more and risk spoiling the film for those who haven't seen it I will just say that this was a very good film which captures the dilemma of both the British government and the plight of the Jewish refugees quite well. Although I didn't especially care for the rather abrupt ending, the rest of the film was extremely enjoyable with both Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint performing their parts particularly well and I have rated this movie accordingly.
