Joseph Cotten is running around an old European country, his life in danger from mysterious forces. Among the places he stumbles through is a seedy nightclub. Can any of the mysterious strangers in his orbit be trusted? Are the government officials on the level? What about the beautiful foreign woman who seems to have a romantic interest in him? There’s Orson Welles around, and I always suspect he can’t be trusted.
Unfortunately, I’m not talking about my favorite movie, which is Carol Reed’s The Third Man. I am instead going to be essaying 1943’s Journey Into Fear, a film so similar to, and so inferior to, the 1949 film as to leave one with the bizarre sensation of somehow having seen something which is ripping off a work that was created after it.
What a mess this is, though it has potential. Cotten, an apparently insignificant man in a munitions firm, arrives in WWII Istanbul with wife Ruth Warrick. He is quickly approached by Everett Sloane, who claims to be the Turkish representative for the same firm. The man also worms his way into sharing dinner with the couple before whisking Cotten away to a nightclub where Dolores Del Rio dances in a weird cat outfit, an apparent prostitute tries to get his business, and he is bought onto the stage for a magic trick that goes horribly wrong, when the magician is killed by a bullet meant for Cotten.
That is just the first few minutes of the runtime. He is soon confronted by a government official played by Orson Welles, who basically kicks him out of the country and puts him on a boat. Alone and confused, Cotten finds himself on a ship full of mysterious strangers, all of whom radiate so much untrustworthiness as to make this feel like a Mad Magazine parody of the suspense genre in general. I could even picture scenes from this picture as reimagined by illustrator Jack Davis.
One person who looks to be trouble from the first minute we meet him is the person we see in the first minute of the runtime. Jack Moss is rotund to the extent of appearing truly round. Our introduction to him has him listening to a record which has a couple of scratches where the needle sticks in the groove. We see him get a gun out of a nightstand drawer and load a clip into it. He also turns off the Victrola without raising the needle, which is bad way to turn off a record player. Also, Victrolas are hand-cranked, so did they actually have an off switch?
That opening shot begins across a street and pushes in on a hotel window. It is an excessively showy camera technique of the kind Welles could never seem to avoid the temptation to do, even if the stated director here is Norman Foster. Really, Welles should have been focused on his acting here, which irritated me with how far he goes over the top, and he seems to be doing so intentionally. He has a ridiculous mustache here, but at least that, unlike his dodgy accent, doesn’t go astray.
Anywho, about the boat upon which he puts Cotten: I could go through all the people on the boat trip that takes up the majority of the remaining runtime, but I don’t feel like it. Del Rio happens to be there, as is her “partner” Jack Durant, though I wasn’t sure if that term only applied to their dance act or if that was intended in a romantic sense. We also have Eustace Wyatt as a British professor of archaeology. There is a curious couple played by Frank Readick and Agnes Moorehead. He is henpecked and always spouting Communist slogans, yet eventually explains to Cotten he doesn’t believe in the tenets of Socialism. Somehow, his taking up the cause keeps his overbearing wife in place.
There is an even chance that any or all characters on the ship are duplicitous. There is even the captain (Richard Bennett) who doesn’t count English among the half-dozen languages he speaks fluently, yet he still finds Cotten’s concerns about his life being in danger to be endlessly hilarious. I’m not sure exactly why I feel this way, but a better version of this film might feel like a Tom Waits song. That the only sound in the dining room seems to be slurping of soup is the kind of detail I imagine he would pick up on.
We spend way too much time with these characters and they all talk waaay too much in proportion to how little much of that conversation advances the plot. As if that wasn’t enough talk already, there’s also excessive and leaden narration from Cotten. As tends to be case, that feels like a Band-Aid to make sense of the film. And this film is weirdly episodic, with a tendency to use fades to black to end most scenes. I was completely unsurprised to later learn this film was butchered by RKO, and different versions seem to exist, though only one was on this blu-ray.
RKO had done that to Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, drastically changing the third act to have an inexplicable and inappropriate change in tone. As I implied earlier, Welles was rumored to have directed Journey Into Fear. I am willing to give stated director Foster the benefit of a doubt, though this picture does not resemble anything like the rest of his filmography. I mean, people claimed the same type of arrangement happened between Welles and Carol Reed behind the scenes of The Third Man, and I refuse to accept that. But, for the picture credited to Foster, maybe Welles wasn’t doing much of a favor. I know I wouldn’t take credit for this mess.
Dir: Norman Foster
Starring Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Ruth Warrick, Orson Welles
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray