Cheap Journey Into Fear (Video) (Joseph Cotten) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Journey Into Fear

Fun wartime film noir
Joseph Cotton plays an American munitions salesman who runs afoul of Axis agents seeking to delay his company's hard-won deal with the Turkish government... He's one of those bumbling mystery movie schnooks who keeps digging themselves in deeper and deeper, causing viewers to repeatedly smack their foreheads in disbelief... Orson Welles plays a blustering Turkish general who takes the American under his wing, perhaps protecting him, perhaps sending him to his doom. Placed on a cramped ocean liner, Cotton soon finds himself stalked by a variety of goons: which are the good guys and which are the baddies? Can you take the tension 'til you find out??

---

A Nearly Forgotten Gem
JOURNEY INTO FEAR is a compact (less than 1 1/4 hours) espionage thriller using the members of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre Company. A munitions expert (Joseph Cotton) has to quickly get out of Turkey as a group of Nazis agents are attempting to capture him. With the aid of a Turkish intelligence officer (beautifully overacted by Orson Welles) he is put aboard a tramp steamer with the usual unsavory assortment of crew and passengers. With the Nazis agents somewhere among the passengers Cotton plays a cat and mouse game to avoid capture or his own death. This is not realy a star movie but an ensemble one where all the characters contribute to the film. With a fine script and crisp direction they do a superb job and by the films end you will have gotten more satisfaction out of it than a film twice its length. Hopefully the film will become more readily available
in the near future.

---

A Clever Addendum To Orson Welles' Career
Although credited to Norman Foster, and co-written by Joseph Cotton, Welles infact "supervised" (i.e. controlled) most of this production. What we get is a tight and very compact (barely over an hour in length) thriller.

Joseph Cotton plays an Engineer who someone is trying to assasinate. Trapped on a steamship crosing the black sea, he avoids attempts on his life (several of them by Welle's real life business manager, Jack Moss).

Think of "Journey..." as a practice run for "Touch Of Evil" and "The Third Man" (I know he didn't direct it but you'll see the similarities). The humour is broader, the dialogue not quite as sophisticated, but it is still Welles at work. While not a major work of Art, it is still a masterpiece of craft.

The Camera-work, as usual, is brilliant -- partucularly the interiors of the steam-ship. Welle's always worked his cameramen hard, forcing them to new heights; lighting rooms "without light", and building sets with ceilings (not a popular practice in the forties). It pays off -- the clautrophobia on board the ship is extreme, and Cotton is excellent as it's primary sufferer. Naturally the camera angles have Welles' innovative stamp all over them.

If you're a Welles fan, "Journey Into Fear" is an absolute must see; a nice precurser (thematically, chronologically, and cinematically) to "The Stranger".

And if you're not a Welle's fan, then you should give your corneas to someone more deserving.

PS:

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any plan for releasing this lost gem on DVD any time soon. A shame, since "Journey Into Fear" (with it's short running time) would make an excellent double bill DVD with another Welles film (The Stranger, for example).