Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Of such strokes is suspense made..., February 3, 2009
The operatic approach of adding a musical dimension to menace with a killer-theme on the soundtrack has been greatly used in Orson Welles' glorious suspense film, "Journey Into Fear," where the little killer obsessively played a scratchy old 78 rpm disc of someone singing "Chagrin d'Amour."
The assassin was short and fat; his belly large, his chin and neck flabby... I do not recall him having a line of dialog to speak... But the whole film was spread with heightened menace when he sat, his little round eyes blank behind his little round pebble lenses, listening compulsively to the atrociously scratchy record, confusing the words of the song at the wrong speed, the needle jumping from groove to groove; his nerve-ends, unlike ours, immune to the discordance...
This was a spy thriller set in the wartime Near East, about an innocent American engineer (Joseph Cotten), pursued by Nazi agents and blundering from danger to danger without seeming to know too much of what it was all about...It was essentially a hunter-and-hunted story, with settings that were often seedy but always exotic...
The opening was in Istanbul, the climax in Batum, and all the terrors between were forced claustrophobically between the low ceilings and narrow partitions of a neglected little steamer plowing the Black Sea...
"Journey Into Fear" lives for its portrait gallery, its atmosphere, and for Welles' touches and excesses...
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Fear" Strikes Out, April 18, 2006
In film school people in the row behind me would whisper that this was one of several films "secretly directed" by Orson Welles, who stars in the movie as Colonel Haki woith a preposterous Istanbul accent with the stress on the last syllable of each word. He tries to steal the whole show, for he seems to have had a compulsion to wipe every other actor off the screen. However this movie has so many hams that none of them budges an inch. You only have to watch a scene or two to believe the back row gossip, for so much of it feels like you're seeing a really inferior Orson Welles production, and the actors are the same ones you only see in Welles' movies! Oh, I suppose Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead were all over the place in the 1940s, not just in the Mercury Theater, but scanning the faces of those bit players is like going through the Mercury High School Yearbook.
People say Norman Foster couldn't have directed this because all he did before were cheesy Charlie Chan movies. Well, I have news for them, those Chan programmers are excellent! I look forward to seeing some of the Foster Chans newly restored to DVD (RENO, PANAMA, TREASURE ISLAND, not a dud among them. Hope JOURNEY INTO FEAR makes it back, too, to its full length, with all the cut scenes restored, especially the rumored "Brief Encounter"-style almost-love scenes between Joseph Cotten's salesman character and the cabaret artist "played" by Dolores del Rio. The picture opens up with Ruth Warrick and Joseph Cotten, the Grahams, forcible separated in a Middle East hotel. For some reason Howard Graham just takes off with Everett Sloane, a business associate, the kind of nut who makes Peter Lorre look sober as a judge, without a second thought to how his wife will get home by herself from Turkey to America -- during wartime.
It seems like a facile excuse to free Cotten up and warm him up for Del Rio's vamp act. However with the movie chopped up as is, she postures with hideous makeup and he stays notably cool, as though she wasn't a sex bomb and he wasn't afraid for his life. Moorehead plays a Xanthippe shrew of a wife aboard a rundown freighter, and Frank Readick does a stalwart job in a thankless role you've seen a zillion times before, the henpecked schlub who finally grows some balls.
It's hard to believe that Welles & Company set out to make a film whose hero works for an armament and munitions manufacturer? Why glorify guns in 1943, well, maybe they were making some kind of hardhitting statement. The movie is fairly faithful to Eric Ambler's often praised novel, but have you ever noticed, has a really good movie ever been made out of any Ambler novel (or script)? If you ask me, in that family it was Joan Harrison who had all the talent.
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Komrad Kane?...Nyet!, December 27, 2005
I was fairly optomistic when I watched the opening cast and credits of "Journey Into Fear". The Mercury Theater troupe were featured throughout the cast with Orson Welles sneaking in the last billing. The story was from a book by Eric Ambler. I've read some of Ambler; not the best but pretty good nonetheless. The shortcoming may have been the director; Norman Foster. I didn't see much that he had added to the production. I looked him up and found he was mostly utilized with Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan movies before later branching into TV. Maybe it was watching Hitchcock's "Number Seventeen" and "The Lady Vanishes" just before watching "Journey Into Fear" that left me blaming the director. However, someone's to blame for the lack of impact of a supposedly suspenseful movie. The thing just seemed to bounce from scene to scene with decent acting but minimal attention to character development. At a key point in the movie, I had seen so little of one character that I had him mixed up with another. Thus I was surprized that he "reappeared" after he was murdered. A director is supposed to pay attention to such details.
It's hard to imagine that Welles didn't provide some input to the directing but he did provide plenty of input to the acting. His role as Colonel Haki was the highlight of the movie although he did slip a notch or two when the script required him to be an action character. He was very impressive as the interrogator.
The story is that of an American OSS-type beaurocrat who was in the Middle East on assignment. He is targeted for assassination and escapes with the aid of a dubious character (Welles). He sets out on a ship across the Black Sea to Istanbul along with a very strange group of fellow passengers. I'll leave it at that. With a time of under 70 minutes, this movie had room for better plot and character development and could have turned out much better. As it was, it was turned out in 1943 when there wasn't a lot of time, money or talent to do it right. For the Welles aficianados, this is an important film. For everyone else, just be thankful it's as short as it is.
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DVD ~ Walter Pidgeon
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