Here’s a film which deserves another look. Although largely dismissed in its time, it is in its own quiet way, a beauty. It gets better and better with each viewing.
Some backround: Journey Into Fear was shot during the waning days of Orson Welles’ amazingly productive but highly contentious stint at RKO Radio Pictures in the early 1940’s, which began with Citizen Kane followed by the director’s crown jewel, The Magnificent Ambersons.
According to Joseph Cotten (who played principal roles in each picture), The minute ‘Ambersons’ was finished, Orson invited me to join him in adapting ‘Journey Into Fear’ from Eric Ambler’s (1940) novel into a screenplay…(The movie) starred Dolores Del Rio and several Mercury actors, including Orson and me.
The actor noted in his 1987 autobiography, Joseph Cotten: Vanity Will Get You Somewhere (Avon Books), that Journey was the last Hollywood venture of the Mercury Theatre Company, founded in 1937 by Welles and producer (and later actor) John Houseman. This is significant because some of Hollywood’s finest character and supporting actors came out of the Mercury.
What buttresses Journey considerably are the many sharp, superlative bits contributed by Mercury players including Everett Sloane, Jack Moss, Richard Bennett, Ruth Warrick and Agnes Moorehead. In his memoir, Cotten concentrates on leading actress del Rio (pictured below) whom he describes as the second most beautiful woman in the world. (First, he wrote, was his second wife, Patricia Medina.)
del Rio is among the most famous Hollywood names to come from Mexico. She was born in Durango as Lolita Dolores Asunsolo de Martinez in 1905, began her move career in the mid-Twenties (Joanna, High Steppes, Pals First). Her career flourished well after the silents were history, and for some time she enjoyed the reputation — as Cotten attests — as one of Hollywood’s most beautiful actresses. She had many romances including an extended fling with — yes — Orson Welles.
The actress portrays in Journey the witty, world weary half of a touring night club dance team (her dissolute, card-shark partner is played by Jack Durant). She encounters Cotten’s character (Howard Graham, an American naval ordinance engineer advising the Turkish Navy in Istanbul) aboard a low-rent cargo boat described as little better than a floating slum. He is fleeing a Naxi-hired hit man. She is on to the next night club engagement.
Having noted that her dancing career is already into its 20th year, del Rio tells Cotten: I do not lie to you about my age…I was born in the Pyrenees. Mother and father were very poor. Cotten to del Rio: But honest, no doubt. del Rio to Cotten: Oh, no. My father was not at all honest.
Cotten as Graham find himself the target of an Nazi ring determined to eliminate him and his naval ordinance expertise before his return to the U.S.
His portrayal of Graham as a gentlemanly, mild-mannered corporate engineer is nicely offset by the sheer nastiness of the hit-man-for hire played by a portly and menacing Jack Moss (actually, Welles’ agent at the time). Welles portrays oversized Col. Haki, head of Turkish secret police, who must protect Graham at all costs. Graham’s wife is played by Ruth Warrick.
Journey Into Fear boasts of one of the most economic and chilling introductory scenes in movie history. It involves the hit man in a shabby Turkish hotel room combing his greasy hair, and loading a pistol — to the backround of scratched record on a gramophone in which the needle is stuck. The surrealistic sound of the scene is a chiller, and sets the tone of this gently graceful thriller.
Final note: Norman Foster is the director of record, but it’s understood Welles staged the several scenes involving himself as an actor. Journey Into Fear — see it.
Colonel Haki is the same character played by Kurt Katch in THE MASK OF DEMETRIOS.
JOURNEY INTO FEAR… When you talk about Orson Welles you really are going on a journey, not into fear so much as illusion.
Welles was one of those who’s career has the legend mixed up with the facts, wrapped in mystery which was the way he, and certain others liked it.
Rising to fame with the Mercury Theatre and the infamous 1938 Halloween CBS radio broadcast of War Of The Worlds which shocked America into thinking the Martians really had invaded, and saw Welles taking the wrap for scaring everyone, when in fact all the time he was working with the government and intelligence in a well planned social engineering experiment that didn’t just happen accidentally. They wanted to see how easily people could be scared and monitor their reaction. Remember, it’s author H.G. Well’s was himself a British intelligence asset, having headed the department in WWI.
So when Orson got his “biggest train set” as he described it to play with in HOLLYWOOD, he was allowed to experiment with movies. Developing radical ideas, radical camera tricks in telling stories, or more to the point, getting propaganda into them for the government.
JOURNEY INTO FEAR was based on the novel by Eric Ambler, another intelligence asset just like Ian Fleming, John Le Carre, Len Deighton, Somerset Maughn, Roald Dahl and so many, many other iconic authors.
And yes, the Mercury Theatre’s co-founder John Houseman was an intelligence asset… To quote the “official” story-
“The Office of the Coordinator of Information was an intelligence and propaganda agency of the United States Government, founded on July 11, 1941, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, prior to U.S. involvement in the Second World War. It was intended to overcome the lack of coordination between existing agencies which, in part, it did by duplicating some of their functions.
Roosevelt was persuaded to create the office several months before the United States entered the war by prominent New York lawyer William J. Donovan, who had been dispatched to London by the president to assess the ability of the British to continue fighting after the French capitulation to German aggression, and by American playwright Robert Sherwood, who served as Roosevelt’s primary speechwriter on foreign affairs. British officials, including John Godfrey of the British Naval Intelligence Division and William Stephenson, head of British Security Coordination in New York, also encouraged Roosevelt to create the agency.
Donovan’s primary interests were military intelligence and covert operations. Sherwood handled the dissemination of domestic information and foreign propaganda. He recruited the noted radio producer John Houseman, who because of his Romanian birth at the time was technically an enemy alien, to develop an overseas radio program for broadcast to the Axis powers and the populations of the territories they had conquered, which became known as the Voice of America. The first broadcast, called in German Stimmen aus Amerika (“Voices from America”) aired on Feb. 1, 1942, and included the pledge: “Today, and every day from now on, we will be with you from America to talk about the war. . . . The news may be good or bad for us — We will always tell you the truth.”[2]
Donovan’s desire to use propaganda for tactical military purposes and Sherwood’s emphasis on what later became known as public diplomacy were a continuing source of conflict between the two men On June 13, 1942, Roosevelt split the functions and created two new agencies: the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of War Information, a predecessor of the United States Information Agency.”
There’s propaganda for good things, but mostly it’s for bad things… And movies, and now television, deliver the very BEST, easy to digest propaganda… Talk about a JOURNEY INTO FEAR!