Journey Into Fear (1943)

Journey Into Fear is an American thriller film first released in 1943, directed by Norman Foster and Orson Welles.  The film is based on a novel by Eric Ambler and stars Joseph Cotten, Dolores del Rio, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead and Jack Durant.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


During WWII, American armaments engineer Howard Graham travels to Istanbul with his wife to attend a conference.  One evening, he meets up with a business associate who persuades him to visit a nightclub.  Here, shortly after being charmed by the seductive dancer Josette Martel, Graham is roped into performing a conjuring trick, during which an attempt is made on his life.  Colonel Haki of the Turkish police tells Graham that his technical expertise is of vital importance to the Allied war effort and that the Nazis have hired assassin Peter Banat to kill him.  Convinced that his life is in danger, Graham accepts Haki’s advice to leave town on a tramp steamer.  But, during the boat trip, he discovers that Banat is one of the passengers...

Despite its modest budget and comparatively short runtime, Journey Into Fear manages to be one of the most stylish and entertaining of the classic film noir thrillers.  The pace is unrelenting and the tension doesn’t ease for a moment as the hero (superbly portrayed by Joseph Cotten) is dragged further and further into a deadly game of political intrigue from which there is, in true noir fashion, no possibility of escape.   Yet there is also a thick underbelly of dark humour to this film which can only really be appreciated after repeated viewings.  

The absurdity of the situation becomes apparent when we realise that the principal baddy is not a lithe Alain Delon-style sharpshooter but a myopic pie-loving slob in a trench coat – something that makes the climactic denouement, a showdown on a ledge a few hundred feet above street level, both comical and thrilling.  There is also fun to be had in Orson Welles’s comic book portrayal of a Turkish police official, which looks as if it may have been inspired by a Tintin story.  Oddly, this intrusion of humour into the morass of espionage-themed thrills adds to the suspense, since the audience is never quite sure of the extent of the peril that confronts the hero as he wends his way down a path strewn with bizarre personalities and improbable plot twists.  Some may appreciate this as a slick, masterfully composed example of film noir; others will undoubtedly enjoy it as tongue-in-cheek parody of a familiar genre.

There has been considerable speculation over the extent of artistic input Orson Welles had into Journey Into Fear.  Although Norman Foster (the prolific actor-director, not the award winning architect) receives sole directing credit, the film clearly has Welles’s sticky fingerprints all over it, his auteur touches (unusual camera angles and chill-inducing use of shadows) recognisable to anyone who has seen Citizen Kane (1941) and The Lady from Shanghai (1947).  Foster was himself an accomplished director and had recently scored a notable success with his Mr Moto thriller series, which featured Peter Lorre playing Japan’s answer to James Bond.   The obvious stylistic differences from Foster’s other work suggests he may have been adhering religiously to storyboards produced by Welles.

Welles frequently denied that he directed any part of the film except for the pre-credits sequence, which mirrors the opening to Citizen Kane.  The film’s murky, Kafkaesque feel is typical of American film noir of this period - a sympathetic hero is caught up in a web of intrigue and threatened by an anonymous, all-powerful opponent – and may be considered a dry run for Welles’s subsequent The Trial (1962).   Although Orson Welles produced and co-scripted Journey Into Fear (with actor Joseph Cotton), he had to give up the directing job to Foster so that he could concentrate on his next project, It’s All True,  the South American folly that was ultimately aborted after Welles lost both control of the budget and the confidence of his bosses at RKO.

© James Travers 2010

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