The Last One to Know: William Holden, The Noble Cynic

Beginning the batch of three films I'd see this past weekend at Lincoln Center's [William Holden: A Different Kind of Hero] retrospective with Blake Edwards' [S.O.B.](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083015/) (1981) was not a good idea. Edwards' anti-Hollywood rant is not a bad film; in fact, if not for its protracted soggy ending, it might have been a great one, on par with Edwards' first two or three Pink Panther films or Victor/Victoria (1982), his last great film. It just doesn't have very much William Holden in it. In fact, Culley, Holden's character is at odds with everyone else in S.O.B. He's a straight man in a world of flamboyantly depraved lunatics. Though he claims to have been a legendary debaucher that "would have made Caligula seem like a celibate" in his day, he's a functional good humor guy, someone to prop up more over-the-top screen hogs like Robert Webber or Robert Preston, Edwards' muse.

Culley is the most down-to-earth character of the cabal of backstabbing, high-as-a-kite actors, producers and hanger-ons that populates Edward's bitter caricature of Hollywood. He's the voice of cynical reason in S.O.B., a studio liaison hired to make unruly director/producer Felix Farmer (Richard Mulligan) accept the studio's cuts to his vanity project, Night Wind, which just bombed critically and financially. He pokes and he prods at Farmer but ultimately just goes along with him even after he decides to turn his sugary sweet flop into a titillating cash cow that features his wife, goody-goody starlet Sally Miles (Edwards' real-life goody-goody wife) in a nude scene.

It makes sense then that a quietly insistent gopher like Culley would sink into the background. Holden gets in a few good zingers-I particularly like when he does one of his signature accusatory stares and sighs pointedly, "It's been my experience that every time I think I know 'where it's at,' 'it''s really somewhere else."-but most of the good lines go to accomplished clowns like Preston. Even Andrews gets benched for the most part, only given one or two juicy lines, like when she huskily giggles under the influence of a powerful sedative, "I'm going to show off my boobies."

Holden may barely be in S.O.B. but that's because it's a later film in his career, a point where he's become typecast as the guy that's already lost the battle with his conscience and has resigned himself to going with the flow. In his heyday, such as in WW2 epics like Carol Reed's [The Key] (1958) and George Seaton's [The Counterfeit Traitor](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055871/) (1962), Holden continually battled the forces of cynicism that would eventually became part of his character.

In both films, the touch of a good woman was enough to set Holden straight, enough to make him want to go and fight the good fight he knew he couldn't win just because it was the right thing to do. And he had some great women too, the lovely to look at Sophia Loren in The Key and the gorgeous and talented Lilly Palmer in The Counterfeit Traitor. They were the beacons of hope that brought Holden's world-weary carcass home, the ones that made him believe in the good that came from his life-threatening and soul-crushing missions.

The portrayal of Holden's women alone is indicative of the brashness of both films, from the un-PC portrayal of Loren's kept women in The Key to Palmer's Madonna-like martyr in The Counterfeit Traitor. These are, after all, the two clichéd roles reserved for women, "half-saint and half-whore," as Diane Keaton announced in Woody Allen's Love and Death. Loren has been with three other captains before hooking up with Holden-he inherits her along with an apartment when his good friend Capt. Chris Ford (Trevor Howard) dies-and Palmer is risking her life by supplying information to the Allies because she believes in what she's doing, unlike Holden, who is being blackmailed.

Whether it's women or the moral crises of the human war hero, The Key and The Counterfeit Traitor are only as ambiguous as big-budget studio films can be, though not necessarily in the same measure. The Key is a much more modest melodrama than The Counterfeit Traitor and hence more capable of navigating around the moral complexities of war-unlike The Counterfeit Traitor, it has nothing so distracting as a squinty-eyed Hitler Youth skulking about nor any background decors as laughably preposterous as hanging gas masks beneath a cuckoo clock in a Gestapo prison.

In fact, I'd say that even though it tries to justify treating Loren as a piece of furniture, The Key is by far the subtler of the two films. It doesn't break down quite as much as The Counterfeit Traitor does when it comes to justifying Holden's actions because it never really tries to. The only time when Holden has to make a grand show of heroism is when he's dead tired and stark-raving mad, a desperate man looking into the faces of frightened peers for support that never comes.

He doesn't speechify as he does in the infrequent and unwelcome moments in The Counterfeit Traitor where the Gestapo takes a break from chasing him. He just lets the chips fall where they may and does his job. If that makes him a hero, he'd be the last one to know.