Journey into Fear
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| Journey Into Fear | |
|---|---|
 Journey Into Fear movie poster |
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| Directed by | Norman Foster |
| Written by | Eric Ambler (novel) Joseph Cotten (screenplay) Richard Collins (uncredited) Ben Hecht (uncredited) Orson Welles (uncredited) |
| Starring | Joseph Cotten Dolores del Rio Ruth Warrick Orson Welles |
| Music by | Roy Webb |
| Distributed by | RKO Radio Pictures Inc. |
| Release date(s) | February 12, 1943 (U.S. release) |
| Running time | 68 min. |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
Journey Into Fear is a well-known 1940 spy thriller by Eric Ambler and a 1943 film made on the basis of the book.
Contents |
[edit] The Book
The early part of the book has a significant appearance of Colonel Haki, the dour but basically likable head of Turkish Security, who already made his first appearance in The Mask of Dimitrios and who would return in later Ambler books as a general.
The protagonist is a British engineer traveling back from Turkey, where he had completed high-level technical talks which could help cement a Turkish-British alliance in the recently-started Second World War. By the same token, it is worthwhile for the Nazis to assassinate him and they energetically embark on efforts to do just that.
Most of the plot takes place on board an Italian ship, where the protagonist travels in company with his nemesis - a satanic yet believable German intellectual spymaster, accompanied by a Romanian hired killer - and with a rich cast of other characters, such as a Turkish secret agent, a Spanish courtesan and her pimp, and a French couple of which the husband is left-leaning and his wife a staunch reactionary.
As common in Ambler's books, the protagonist is not a professional spy, and is clearly out of his depth. Indeed, the chief Nazi treats him with open contempt, which for much of the book seems amply justified. Yet ultimately the German professional pays dearly for underestimating this amateur - another plot element which was to be repeated in later Ambler books.
The book came to be regarded as a classic among spy thrillers, setting out what became some of the genre's basic conventions and immensely influencing later works including the James Bond series. (In particular the main part of From Russia with Love, like Ambler's book, takes place during days and nights of tense traveling from Turkey to France, with the protagonist in imminent danger of being assassinated; while Fleming's protagonist is a professional, in this book he makes amateurish mistakes.)
Part of the book's lasting charm is its capturing the atmosphere and mindset of the "Phony War" phase during which it was written: France is standing strong and nobody dreams that it would fall within a few months, the Italians are strictly neutral and there is no suggestion that they are about to ally with Germany against Britain, and so on. From the book it seems that Ambler—like many Britons at the time of writing—expected the war to be more or less a replay of the First World War.
[edit] The Film
The 1943 film broadly follows the plot of the book, but the protagonist has been made by the American makers into a United States Navy engineer and his attempts to escape the Nazi forces take place during a trip back to the United States.
The film was directed by Norman Foster, but many have speculated input by director Orson Welles as well (Welles told Peter Bogdanovich that they were in such a rush to complete his scenes before Welles departed for Brazil to film It's All True that the person directing was whoever was closest to the camera... But Welles also states in the very same book that he, Welles, didn't direct any part of the film, and that it was Norman Foster, a friend of his, that was, and is, the director). Welles did produce and design the picture and wrote the script with the star, Joseph Cotten. He also appears as an actor in the movie. Welles main contribution as producer was the very beginning pre-credit sequence showing the assassin listening to an old phonograph which then starts to skip. The camera "floats" up to his apartment room from outside, much in the style of certain crane shots in Citizen Kane. In the book "This is Orson Welles", Welles states that, at the time, he had thought he was the first to come up with a scene before the credits (most films would begin with credits); he later learned that there were a couple movies that did this in the late thirties.
In 1975 Daniel Mann remade Journey Into Fear with Sam Waterston and Vincent Price. That film is best remembered today as the first major Hollywood production to be filmed in Vancouver. In 2001 a Vancouver-based artist, Stan Douglas, remade the movie as a film installation with a recombinant soundtrack.
In 2005 an alternate cut of the 1943 film was shown at the Welles film retrospective in Locarno, Switzerland. It was the original European release print, lacking the narration and ending of the US version but including about six minutes of footage later deleted by RKO.
[edit] Featured cast
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Joseph Cotten | Howard Graham |
| Dolores del Rio | Josette Martel |
| Orson Welles | Colonel Haki |
| Ruth Warrick | Mrs. Stephanie Graham |
| Agnes Moorehead | Mrs. Mathews |
[edit] See also
- MAH (Milli Emniyet Hizmeti - the Turkish National Security Service, Colonel Haki's real-life organization.) The actual head of the agency was Şükrü Âli Ögel.
