Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Week.
[For those who new to the column, A Movie A Week is just that, a dedicated way for me explore vintage cinema every week. I’ll review a movie every Monday and each one will be connected to the one before it via a common thread, either an actor, director, writer, producer or some other crew member. Each film, pulled from my DVD shelf or recorded on the home DVR (I heart TCM) will be one I haven’t seen.]
Good morning all. Today’s installment of A Movie A Week follows Orson Welles over from last week’s THE LONG, HOT SUMMER. In last week’s film Welles played a larger than life Southern property owner trying to marry off his eldest daughter and in this week’s film, JOURNEY INTO FEAR, Welles plays the small, but important role of Colonel Haki, a larger than life Turkish patriot.
Basically what you have a Naval engineer stopping over in Turkey played by Joseph Cotten. He’s also somehow involved in supplying our Turkish allies during the fight against the Nazis and for this reason he’s a marked man.
Cotten is hunted by a German who I can best describe as the giggling Nazi from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, but with Hitchcock’s profile. This dude, played by Jack Moss, makes a great villain. He likes to listen a scratched record as he prepares for each kill and in fact opens the movie, cleaning his Luger listening to this record. It’s a disturbing opening that promises a taut thriller.
In the first few minutes we meet Cotten and his wife as he’s whisked away to take in a show he doesn’t particularly want to attend. This is the last time he sees his wife until the end of the film as at this show someone takes a shot at him.
And it’s a magic show! Which makes it even more awesome, especially considering that the magic show opens with a Delores del Rio number with Ms. del Rio parading around in a leopard outfit.
Cotten is called up on stage to take part in the act, tied to a cross while the magician is nailed into a wooden box. The lights go out and within seconds a gunshot is heard. When the lights come back up the magician is dead on the cross and Cotten is let out of the coffin, not knowing what’s gone on.
Enter Col. Haki (Welles) who is a shady character, full of ominous menace, as a Welles character is wont to be, telling Cotten of this Nazi agent who sent the fat man, called Banat, after Cotten. Welles tells him his life is in danger, who is after him and why, then rushes Cotten onto a ship back to America, without any luggage or even his wife.
The manner is so quick that you can’t help but be suspicious of Welles’ motives. That’s one thing the movie does really well… it puts Cotten in a constant state of danger. He’s thrown into this situation so quickly that his head (and ours) is spinning. Anybody could be watching him, anybody could be a Nazi. No one can be trusted.
On this boat there are a myriad of different personalities, another positive of the movie. There’s del Rio and her gambler manager, a socialist (Frank Readick) who is only a socialist because he hates his nagging wife (Agnes Moorehead) so much that he started going to meetings and repeating the Socialist rhetoric because it upsets her, a tobacco salesman (Edgar Barrier) and an archeologist (Eustace Wyatt).
As it turns out there are Turk agents and Nazi agents mixed among them and it’s not easy to pick out who is who, even when some of them come clean.
And to make matters worse, after the first stop, at some port or another, Cotten is informed that a new passenger has come aboard and then we hear the scratched record from the beginning and we know without seeing him that the fat assassin has arrived.
There are a lot of great touches like that in this movie, but it’s not perfect. There are some logic issues… the main being that after it is revealed who the Nazi agent is he tells Cotten that all he wants is to delay Cotten’s work and wants to fake a typhoid illness for 6 weeks. The Turkish agent (by now also revealed) tells him that this illness is just an excuse to murder Cotten in the most convenient way possible, but then that Turkish agent ends up dead on the boat.
If the bad guys didn’t want to risk murdering Cotten on the boat, why kill the Turkish agent? Why didn’t they just kill Cotten when they could have?
There’s also a very bad voice-over by Cotten that is completely not needed, spoken as if in a letter to his wife. A little research shows that this was a studio decision that Welles had to comply with.
But all that said, it’s not a bad movie. In fact, it’s a very good little movie. I say little not in a condescending way. It is a short film, under 70 minutes long, and feels like a rush from beginning to end. We’re rushed onto the boat where we get to meet a lot of interesting characters, my favorite being the old Turkish captain who finds it hilarious that Cotten thinks a man on board is trying to kill him. Whenever this old captain runs across Cotten on the ship he always points his finger and goes “Boom boom” and laughs and laughs. Great character, perfect for breaking up the tension.
The finale is also very strong, when Cotten goes with the Nazi agents at the next port only to find his wife waiting for him. Suddenly the game changes and his wife is in danger, bringing the passive business man all the way around to reluctant hero. We get a great shoot-out on the ledge of a hotel during a night storm to play us out.
Watching the film and seeing its flaws I couldn’t help but imagine a remake. Much to my surprise there was a remake in the ‘70s starring Vincent Price, Zero Mostel, Yvette Mimieux, Joseph Wiseman, Shelley Winters, Donald Pleasence, Stanley Holloway, Jackie Cooper, Sam Waterston and Ian McShane, believe it or not. What a helluva cast! The reviews on IMDB aren’t very positive, but I’m very curious to track it down.
I can imagine some very sharp screenwriter taking a successful crack at this Mercury Theater Production of an RKO Film today, removing the weaknesses, playing up the paranoia and building a great cast around this film. Get Brian Blessed for Haki, Clooney for the Cotten role, John Goodman for the fat Nazi assassin role and Catherine Zeta Jones for the del Rio role and you have yourself a winner, right?
Another interesting tidbit about this film is it’s Cotten’s only credited writing credit. He adapted the original novel by Eric Ambler. I haven’t read much about Cotten so I don’t know exactly why this was his only attempt at screenwriting, but the man had talent… or at least adapted Ambler’s book really well. Either way, that’s a good trait in a screenwriter.
Final Thoughts: If I had to talk in percentages I’d say this is about 70% great, 25% okay and 5% bad, which probably shakes down to being really good. At least that’s how I feel about it. The badness in the film isn’t offensive, just missed opportunities or logic jumps, meaning they’re easy to ignore. All the performances are great, Cotten probably the least interesting (but then again that’s his character) and the black and white photography by Karl Struss is fantastic, even when watched on TCM. The character work is strong, but the tension could have been amped up. It’s definitely a movie that is ripe for a great retelling… or at the very least a decent DVD treatment.
Upcoming A Movie A Week Titles:
Monday, July 20th: HOW THE WEST WAS WON (1962)
Monday, July 27th: CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (1948)
Monday, August 3rd: ROPE (1948)
Monday, August 10th: THE SEVENTH CROSS (1944)
Apologies if any "Cotten"s got corrected by my Microsoft Word auto-correct to "Cotton" and I didn't catch it. Every single time I typed "Cotten" I had to go back and make the program realize that's how I really wanted it.
Anyway, I’m headed to New York this week (catching a Paul McCartney concert and also taking in GOD OF CARNAGE on Broadway), so I already watched next weeks’ HOW THE WEST WAS WON so I can have that review on time Monday. Then I dive into Comic-Con, God help me. Gonna be a busy few weeks. Can’t wait to write up HTWWW, though. Have a lot to say about that film and the Cinerama process. See you next week!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter
