Review of Journey Into Fear

Wartime noir crafted from an Eric Ambler thriller, with a screenplay by lead actor Joseph Cotton with Orson Welles, and the influence of Orson Welles is everywhere. He produced and designed the film, and speculation is that he lost control at some point in the production, that RKO brought in another director to take over the project, and that extreme cuts were made. The run time is very short, just 68 minutes. Character development (other than Cotten as protagonist) seems spotty and and events seem to accelerate in the last third of the film, an acceleration not explained by the escalating excitement of the story-line. Nonetheless, the film works as a splendid admixture of wartime intrigue and film noir, and bears the mark of Welles's vision, the strong camera angles, the shadowy sets, the large and small spaces, the cutting. Cotten is fine as Howard Graham, a naval engineer whose assistance to the Turkish navy the Nazis would like to cut short. The plot has a many intricacies and concealed identities, but the strongest character by far is the Turkish head of intelligence, Col. Haki, played by Welles as a powerful, shrewd, smart man with a trace of self-mocking humour. The propaganda function of the film—including its indirect persuasion directed to the U.S. about joining the effort to defeat the Nazis—is very well handled.