JOURNEY INTO FEAR (77)

Directed by: Norman Foster (and Orson Welles) (1942)

Starring: Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, Dolores del Rio, Everett Sloane

The Pitch: An American munitions expert gets involved with Nazis in wartime Europe.

Theo Sez: In the tradition of eccentric Wellesian larks like LADY FROM SHANGHAI and F FOR FAKE : as in that film, there's even a conjuror doing magic tricks, implicitly warning us (as the Crimson Pirate put it) to believe only half of what we see. Even that's a bit of a tall order, given that the film is slighter than either of the abovementioned - it only lasts 71 minutes, for a start - but it remains full of offbeat pleasures, right from its opening scene (in which an obese, baby-faced killer primps himself in his dingy hotel room, listening to a gramophone with a needle that keeps sticking) : menace constantly collides with bizarre deadpan humour, making for a stable-mate to BEAT THE DEVIL (with Cotten, in proto-THIRD MAN mode, as the naive hero beset by shady foreigners) - especially in the wonderfully brisk and atmospheric first act, in which escalating paranoia is offset by Sloane's treasurable turn as a Turkish merchant with a hearty manner and incongruous, Middle East-accented Noo Yawk diction ("Purrit dere!" he barks on first meeting, extending his hand). The joke then gradually wears thin, as the Levantine intrigues pile up and our hero (like the US) gradually gets involved in the War effort - but with little payoff, except a climactic fight on a rainy ledge that (like the Hall of Mirrors climax in SHANGHAI, only less so) is memorable more for its visual dazzle than what actually happens. A messy, cheerful jape, emphatically no masterpiece - just the kind of irresistible shadows-and-fog cult item where action co-exists with poetry and silky-voiced villains get dialogue like this : "When a man reaches my age he grows I think to resent subconsciously the movement of everything, except the respiratory muscles which keep him alive. Movement, you see, means change - and, to an old man, change means death..."