Instant Favorite.

Great Film overall

Absolutely Brilliant!

Absolutely brilliant

The plot to "Journey Into Fear" is not a complicated one...but it seems to make the most of it. When the story begins, Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten) is in Istanbul on business and anticipates leaving the country in the morning. However, a simple night out with a man who also works for Graham's company turns into a murder...and the intended victim appears to have been Graham but as luck has it he was spared. But the local secret police chief (Orson Welles) insists that to protect Graham he'll send him out of the country by slow boat instead of the train in order to avoid Nazi agents. Unfortunately, the Nazi agents anticipated this and soon Graham finds himself aboard a boat filled with murderers. Can he possibly survive?The story is rather simple but with a rousing ending and nice camera work it makes the absolute most of what it's got. Well worth seeing and a nice example of simplicity making for a nice picture.

American ballistics expert Howard Graham is in Istanbul, Turkey. After being recalled home to the USA, he dim-wittingly stumbles hesitantly through an assassination plot from one dilemma to another in ever-decreasing circles while trapped on board a ship travelling to Batumi, a Soviet port. The snare he finds himself in, involving the differing military interests in Turkey, grows tighter by the minute, leaving him bewildered. Orson Welles contribution as Turkish secret police Colonel Haki is quite understated in this film, not allowing his presence to dominate the screen, so instead showcasing the lead actor's talent with the screen being hogged by Joseph Cotten. We follow his character Graham weaving along a dark path of distrust and treachery, that ultimately leads to a fatal confrontation between the competing conspirators in a nighttime, rain-soaked Turkish hotel. Ruth Warrick plays Graham's wife and sultry Dolores Del Rio (at the time of filming, Wells's current partner), a courtesan and traveling companion, are the feminine interests. Eustace Wyatt provides the meat of the Nazi lead villain - Muller, with Jack Moss as the creepy bespectacled assassin Banat. Directed by Norman Foster from an Orson Welles - Joseph Cotten screenplay; Journey Into Fear is anything but that and feels solely as a director-actor combination contrivance for the studio's (possibly contractual) need to provide the release of product. Even one as butchered as this, RKO failed to damage Welles's long term acceptability and credibility, though Welles did enough damage to his career himself. As wartime espionage, the plot though apparently convoluted, is simple and formulaic, with the proceedings plodding, the action minimal, the ending coming sooner than expected and unwelcomed. Contributed in part by harsh editing, to the rushed pace of the final reel. As a film noir, it also fails to grip the viewer due to lack of suspense & tension and little emotional connection with the protagonist. This makes it for me, one of Welles's least successful films - one to forget. Other reviewers have taken time to detail the film's failings in plot, execution and continuity, which most likely was due to the severing of connections between RKO and Welles's Mercury Productions prior to the film's release. I am not bothered and truthfully I have spent far longer in reviewing this than is necessary, but wanted to state why it disappointed me so much. I feel that later viewings may elicit a better psychological & emotional connection with the film, now the plot generally holds no significance. I watched the British released version, without as I have been advised elsewhere, the USA version's opening narration or final letter scene between Haki and Graham. The UK version presented by Talking Pictures TV recently, premiered on Freeview 81; prior to the end credits finished with Graham outside in the torrential rain on the (third-floor?) hotel ledge gripping the wall - when his wife Stephanie, unaware of much of the proceedings, calls to him emphatically to come down immediately as if he is a stupid boy.

I don't know. It was directed by Norman Foster but it's got Orson Welles' fingerprints on it. It was the last cinematic gathering of the Murcury Theater crowd -- Everett Sloan, Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Cotton as a naval engineer trying to reach his destination across the Black Sea without being murdered first.There are occasional odd camera angles, a few shots from floor level, and sometimes strange lighting. It was co-written by Welles and Joseph Cotton. But it's not really Orson Welles. It's about one half of an Orson Welles which, by 1942, was already plenty.Stripped to its armature, it resembles one of Alfred Hitchcock's "ordinary-man-in-jeopardy" films of the period -- "The 39 Steps" or "Saboteur." Cotton is traveling through war-time Turkey with his wife, assigned to help Turkey improve its naval guns or something. The Nazis try to prevent this by the simple expedient of murdering him.Most of the film was shot aboard a mock up of a small freighter and there is little sense of being at sea. The passengers all seem to be lying about their identities and intentions. Welles himself comes on like a ton of bricks as Colonel Haki of the Turkish Secret Police. He seems to be enjoying himself immensely. Among the languages spoken are Turkish, French, English, Greek, and Russian.The sometimes dull proceedings are lightened by the performances. The ship's captain laughs insanely when he's not slurping soup through his phenomenal mustache. Some are plain grotesques. Agnes Moorehead hacks away at a French accent. As the Nazi hit man, Albert Moss, in ridiculous fedora and eyeglasses like Coke bottle bottoms, resembles some kind of slimy pallid thing you might find by turning over a large boulder.The final shoot out is pretty well handled. And Joseph Cotton does a respectable turn as the bewildered American swept up in a tangle of intrigue.A curiosity, more than anything else, it's still worth one watch.

"Journey Into Fear" is an intriguing wartime thriller which features a frightened protagonist, a Nazi assassin, exotic locations and a variety of rather eccentric and sometimes threatening characters. The story which is based on Eric Ambler's espionage novel of the same name is quite involved and the action takes place in an environment which is often tense and menacing.Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten) is an American armaments expert who visits Istanbul with his wife during World War 11 and is met almost immediately by a man called Kopeikin (Everett Sloan) who is his company's local representative. Kopeikin is very pushy and quickly persuades Graham to go with him to a local nightclub where a magician is shot and killed in circumstances which convince Graham that he was the intended target.The nightclub incident is investigated by Colonel Haki (Orson Welles) who's the Head of the Secret Police. Haki is aware that Graham's expertise is vital to the planned re-armament of the Turkish navy and that if anything happened to him, the project would suffer a very damaging setback. Haki tells Graham that the attempt on his life had been made by an assassin called Peter Banat (Jack Moss) who'd been hired by a Nazi agent and then, for his own safety, promptly arranges for him to travel on a cargo boat to Batumi.During the journey Graham grows more anxious as he finds himself surrounded by a strange group of passengers which includes Peter Banat and when he tells the ship's captain that he's seen an assassin on board, the disbelieving captain openly ridicules him for being paranoid. At the end of his journey, Graham is ushered into a waiting car by Banat but when the car has to be stopped to change a flat tyre, Graham makes his escape. A frantic chase follows before the story reaches its extremely tense and exciting climax.Expressionistic lighting and some eccentric camera angles are used to good effect to create the disturbing atmosphere which seems to permeate the whole movie and the impressive opening sequence and a shoot-out which takes place on a hotel ledge are both exceptionally well executed. Norman Foster is credited as being the film's director but over the years there's also been a great deal of speculation concerning the extent to which Orson Welles was involved. What is indisputable, however, is that "Journey Into Fear" certainly has a great many of the characteristics which audiences readily recognise as being Wellsian.It's well documented that Welles was committed to completing this movie for contractual reasons and no doubt, this fact and the studio's subsequent heavy editing resulted in an end product which has a real throwaway quality about it. There's so much that's so good in "Journey Into Fear" that it inevitably leaves the feeling that, with greater commitment, it could have been even better.