JOURNEY INTO FEAR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 253, 28 April 1944, Page 14

JOURNEY INTO FEAR

(RKO-Radio)

[N reviewing Shadow of a Doubt the other week, I mentioned that Alfred Hitchcock gave the impression in

it of moving in the direction of Orson Welles. Now in Journey Into Fear, Welles seems to be going to meet Hitchcock; and of the two, Welles has covered the greater distance. He treats a typical Hitcheock situation in a typical Hitchcock manner, with much of that director’s flair for creating suspense by means of unusual photography and attention to menacing details. Despite these points of similarity, however, Journey ‘Into Fear is still a strongly individualistic picture; a milestone among thrillers, highly recommended to connoisseurs. Its setting is Turkey, its theme is the man-hunt. On his way out of Turkey with vital war information is a young American engineer (Joseph _ Cotton) whom Nazi agents want to kill. Easily identifiable as a Nazi assassin is a tubby; bespectacled, silent man (played with terrifying menace by Jack Moss). But there are others, and neither. the hero nor the audience knows exactly who they are. The chief of the Turkish Secret Service (Orson Welles himself) smuggles the hero aboard a freighter leaving the country-but the Nazis are already on the vessel. Thereafter, in an atmosphere of mounting eeriness and dread, a cat-and-mouse game goes onj (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) as the bewildered, frightened engineer tries to elude the fate that he knows to be hanging over him. People he least suspects turn out to be enemies, while friends appear in unexpected places; and always in the dimly-lit cabins and corridors of which Orson Welles is so fond, the shadows hint at hidden terrors, Journey Into Fear should be capable of wearing some of the covering off the edges of theatre seats almost anywhere, even when the people sitting in them are just ordinary entertainmentseekers and not earnest searchers after Cinematic truth. For superficially this is just a better-than-average thriller, much less an eccentric curiosity than other Welles productions (perhaps because Welles left the direction of it to Norman Foster). But the cognoscenti will tot be slow to recognise wherein the distinction lies or that they are again in the presence of one of the screen’s few pathfinders.