Journey Into Fear

Despite the promising title, this creaky WWII spy thriller has about as many thrills as a cold rice pudding and is of historical interest only as Orson Welles started the project, his third and final feature for RKO, to complete contractual requirements, but the studio took it out of his hands and put it into those of Disney regular, Norman Foster. The notoriously difficult director remains, heavily made up as a Turkish police chief and looking like Stalin (who appears towards the end of the film on a prominently placed poster), as do his band of Mercury players including Everett Sloane and Ruth Warrick (the film remained a Mercury Theatre production)  as well as Welles’ squeeze at the time, Dolores Del Rio.

The script is by an uncredited Welles and Joseph Cotten who adapted it from an Eric Ambler novel about a munitions expert (Cotten) targetted by Nazi hitmen and forced to flee Istanbul aboard a leaky tub with a gaggle of disreputables. Despite the fact that the film displays a expressionistic style characteristic of  the director of Citizen Kane and apparently his own scenes were directed by Welles himself, at barely over an hour it seems to have hacked about (Welles, who experienced similar rough-handling from RKO over his previous film The Magnificent Ambersons, claimed that RKO tried to turn it into an action thriller) and the outcome is at best perfunctory.

FYI: The film  was remade with the same title in 1975 with the unlikely combination of Sam Waterston, Zero Mostel and Yvette Mimieux in the leads as well as Shelley Winters, Donald Pleasence, Vincent Price and Stanley Holloway in the cast. ]

 

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