It’s the WW2 spy thriller that everyone once assumed Orson Welles directed without credit. Director Norman Foster does good things with Eric Ambler’s tale of an American cornered by Nazi killers; Joseph Cotten co-wrote as well as starred and Dolores Del Río and Orson provide fine supporting performances. Welles’ problems at RKO surely contributed to recuts and re-shoots. This excellent remaster doesn’t acknowledge a longer version reportedly screened overseas, which may or may not be an improvement. The disc includes a trio of Mercury Theater radio plays.

Journey into Fear
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1943 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 68 min. / Street Date October 1, 2024 / Available at MovieZyng / 21.99
Starring: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Río, Orson Welles, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead, Jack Durant, Everett Sloane, Eustace Wyatt, Frank Readick, Edgar Barrier, Jack Moss, Stefan Schnabel, Hans Conried, Robert Meltzer, Richard Bennett, Torben Meyer.
Cinematography: Karl Struss
Art Directors: Albert S. D’Agostino, Mark-Lee Kirk
Gowns: Edward Stevenson
Film Editor: Mark Robson
Original Music: Roy Webb
Screenplay by Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles from the novel by Eric Ambler
Produced by Orson Welles
Directed by Norman Foster

In between creating two film masterpieces, raising Holy Hell with the Hearst Syndicate and literally Flying Down to Rio for a film-and-party dream assignment, Orson Welles toyed with a few partly-prepped projects at RKO. The one that reached movie screens — a year after Welles had been ejected from the studio — is a nifty espionage thriller with a contemporary wartime background.

Journey into Fear appears to be the first work by author Eric Ambler to reach the screen. Ambler later wrote screenplays for some fine, uncompromising pictures:  The Cruel Sea,  The Purple Plain,  A Night to Remember. But this small-scale thriller is a rewarding experience for fans of Welles, The Mercury Players and spys movie in general. The generic idea of One Man Alone trying to outwit foreign agents is peppered with some fine twists. Some very good moments now seem predictable only through repetition in a million movies and TV shows.

We wonder if Welles obtained multi-film contracts for his Mercury Players, or if the (mostly) radio artistes were hired project by project. This doesn’t resemble RKO’s standard output, at least not its casting …. no Tom Conway here. Welles hired his girlfriend Srta. Del Río and gave Joseph Cotten the major assignment of co-writing the screenplay. He tapped other radio talent (Frank Readick) and slotted favorite Hans Conreid into a special bit featuring stage magic. Conreid’s one scene works a nice twist on an immortal quote by the legendary Rod Riley:  “That bullet was meant for ME.”

Although way short of action by modern standards, Journey into Fear confects an engaging tangle of ‘mystery intrigues’ featuring a whole passel of shady characters. Perhaps too many shady characters, at least in the fast-paced version retained by Turner/Warners. The 68-minute running time must introduce and develop at least twelve ‘usual suspects.’ This means that good actors Agnes Moorehead and Ruth Warrick aren’t given enough screen time. In spy movies we readily expect nice folk to suddenly reveal themselves to be shadier than the obvious Shady Characters. Orson Welles makes such a strong impression that we’re surprised that he also has been corralled into just a few scenes. Yet there’s time for long speeches from the aforementioned Frank Readick, 8th billed. He rattles on about pretending to be a socialist and a communist, as a ruse to keep his wife in line. The movie is short on wartime patriotic slogans, but there’s time for this ‘funny’ talk about Reds.

The movie begins in Turkey and ends up in Soviet territory, but casual viewers might not pick up on that unless they recognize the Russian spoken by a couple of hotel maids. Actually, in 1943 many homefront Americans didn’t know if the Turks were with the Allies or the Axis. U.S. engineer Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten) is a specialist in naval munitions. He’s going to catch a train to begin a trip back to the States, with his gracious wife Stephanie (Ruth Warrick). They’re instead intercepted in their hotel by his company’s Turkish representative, Kopeikin (Welles regular Everett Sloane). The garrulous Kopeikin talks Howard into leaving ‘to discuss business,’ a harmless move that nevertheless plunges the unsuspecting engineer into a whirlwind of confusing events, with people that can’t be trusted. Witnessing a killing in a nightclub, Howard discovers that he may have been the intended target.

Turkish secret policeman Colonel Haki (Orson Welles) claims that he’s detained Howard Graham to save his life, for the good of the war effort. Haki all but forces Howard to immediately flee westward by boat, without contacting Stephanie. On a shabby tramp steamer captained by an Italian (Richard Bennett), Howard soon realizes that the enemy agents Col. Haki told him about (Jack Moss & Eustace Wyatt) are on board as well. He finds that gun Kopeikin gave him has been stolen. He gravitates toward dancer Josette Martel (Dolores Del Río), a fellow passenger that he met in the club the night before.

Howard is just scared, but Josette takes his attentions as a personal interest. Convinced that he’s slated for murder, Howard can’t get the captain or the first officer (Stefan Schnabel) to take him seriously. Yet another passenger (Edgar Barrier) identifies himself as Haki’s agent, there to protect Graham. Desperate, Howard looks for help to the henpecked husband (Frank Readick) of an unpleasant passenger (Agnes Moorehead), to no avail. It looks like the Nazi agents are going to win.

Journey into Fear looks and sounds more advanced than average films of 1943. As is often pointed out, the audio tracks in Welles’ films upped the game for Hollywood, which seldom made creative use of the soundtrack. Adapting radio techniques, he mixes in ambient noises, and at one point forces people to talk over some radio racket in a police station. A skipping phonograph record is used to identify a villain. Welles as producer imposed plenty of style choices on the movie — which has of course fed fan claims that he stealth-directed it.

Journey into Fear has enough talk to be a radio play, but fine direction by Norman Foster ( Rachel and the Stranger,  Woman on the Run) prevents the pace from going slack. Orson Welles was reportedly so busy with other projects that he barely had time to contribute his performance as Colonel Haki, but his handprints are all over the finished product. Besides the interesting casting, Welles likely helped pre-plan sequences and shots. Ace cameraman Karl Struss is clearly working from Welles notes, composing in depth with slightly wide-angle lenses. It isn’t just a matter of ‘showing ceilings.’ Although the film was made at the same studio as Mark Robson’s  The Ghost Ship, Foster’s shipboard direction is far more dynamic. Journey into Fear’s images make us feel like we’re in actual ship compartments, not on a sound stage.

Cotten & Welles’ screenplay rushes to ratchet up the jeopardy quotient, from inconvenience, to disruption, to the point where Howard Graham is asking strangers to do things for him after he’s been killed. In approved spy tradition, most of the characters Howard meets are wholly ambiguous. His ‘friend’ Kopeikin never earns our trust — he acts too much like a ‘slippery foreigner.’ Is Colonel Haki what he claims to be, or is he a Nazi agent?  So many films of this kind hang on Good Guys suddenly revealing themselves as double agents. Howard seems naïve for accepting anybody at face value.

While keeping us guessing, the movie hints at adult content not expected in films cleared by the Production Code. Kopeikin may just be an awkward host, but it really looks as if he’s foisting Josette. Another woman at their table is more direct with Howard about ‘money’ and ‘meeting later.’  We also wonder if the dancer Josette is some kind of Mata Hari operative in Haki’s employ. Then there are those odd ‘I pretend to be a Commie with my wife’ speeches by Frank Readick’s henpecked husband.

RKO certainly provided good production values. The shipboard scenes are more credible than usual, and great camera angles enhance the climactic struggle on a high-floor ledge of a Russian hotel, in a drenching downpour. The performances are excellent throughout, with Welles doing his best not to unbalance the picture with his presence. Is Colonel Haki his first ‘character’ film performance, in a career that would see Welles doing a lot more acting than actual directing?  We do have to say that our first sight of Haki, striding through a police station in a heavy coat and fur hat, reminds us of Marlene Dietrich making a grand entrance in some exotic costume or another. The still photos available make Orson’s Colonel Haki look like Joe Stalin … not the impression given by the film itself.

Notes in various accounts agree that the release of Journey into Fear was delayed by the better part of a year, for reshoots and re-cuts. Welles reportedly directed a new opening, an atmospheric little bit showing an assassin leaving his hotel room. It’s a good lesson in how to keep the screen alive without dialogue. We observe the man’s actions, assuming they will have a significance… it’s like Monroe Stahr’s “watch what happens” pantomime demo in Elia Kazan’s  The Last Tycoon. The assassin plays a record, which skips … much later on the steamship we hear a record player skipping the same way, and know that something is up. That audio connection raises doubt that the prologue was really a last-minute revision.

Also reportedly added after the fact is a voiceover from Howard, representing a letter he’s writing at the finish, trying to convince Stephanie that he wasn’t running away with the exotic cabaret dancer Josette. As a rule of thumb, studios add explanatory voiceovers when they think the storyline is too confusing for average audiences. This narration is well written yet very damaging — it interferes with the film’s first-person ‘here and now’ quality. What if the excellent Polanski movie  Frantic had occasional voiceover from Harrison Ford, speaking from the future, telling his wife what a difficult time he was having while rescuing her from kidnappers?

We’ve read reports of a European cut of Journey into Fear screened abroad in 2005 that is several minutes longer and has a different finale than Turner/Warner’s official version. Could that cut be an improvement?  Our standard version ends abruptly and feels slightly unresolved. We wonder if it would play better without the hand-holding of the flashback narration.

Spoilers:

Laura of the valued page  Laura’s Miscellaneous Musings came to the rescue. She reports that what she saw at a Noir City screening back in 2011 was indeed the European variant. She wrote that it ends with Howard Graham “brought down to Earth by his surprised wife’s final lines.”   In the cut on this WAC Blu-ray, Stephanie Graham is reunited with Howard for only a minute in their hotel room. She gets left behind while he leaps into the final spy chase action, fighting two killers on a dangerous hotel ledge. Stephanie is not part of the finale, so she doesn’t get to say any snappy final dialogue.

The alternate finale Laura saw at the Noir City screening is fully described at the  Wellesnet website: in that cut, Stephanie Graham does speak the last words in the movie, as Howard steps to safety from the hotel ledge. Writing in 2005, Wellesnet poster Roger Ryan said that the alternate cut has a more humorous tone, and spelled out its specific differences. But he describes a couple of scenes as new, although they appear to be in the WAC’s Blu-ray version. Do even more variant versions exist?

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Journey into Fear is a pin-sharp encoding of this richly filmed B&W picture, a movie that fits in well with the romantic, dark images of the initial wave of films noir. Karl Struss’s neat trucking shots make us think we’re winding through real steamship corridors, and the slightly wider choice of lenses makes everything seem more immediate, more intimate.

The show demanded our attention this time through, and we didn’t make mental notes about Roy Webb’s busy music score. We’re of course curious about longer versions that do or don’t exist. The Warner Archive does sensational work with this standard cut, however.

The extras for the disc are a trio of the very first three Mercury Theater radio broadcasts starting in July of 1938. The first is Orson Welles’ adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for a 60-minute radio format. The opening announcer speaks breathlessly of Welles as America’s number one entertainment genius from Broadway.

Has anyone seen the 1975 film version of Journey into Fear, directed by Daniel Mann?  Its rating isn’t hight but the cast is impressive. Sam Waterston takes the Joseph Cotten role, Zero Mostel is in for Everett Sloane, Yvette Mimieux for Dolores Del Río, Shelley Winters subs for Agnes Moorehead and Joseph Wiseman is Colonel Haki. Along for the ride are Scott Marlowe, Ian McShane, Stanley Holloway, Donald Pleasence, Vincent Price and Jackie Cooper.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Journey into Fear
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements (audio only):
Three Orson Welles Mercury Theater radio broadcasts: Dracula (7/11/1938), Treasure Island (7/18/1938), and A Tale of Two Cities (7/25/1938).
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: October 13, 2024
(7206fear)

Final product for this review was provided free by The Warner Archive Collection.

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