Sat 9 Mar 2019
A Book! Movie!! Review by Jonathan Lewis: ERIC AMBLER – Journey Into Fear / Film (1943).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Suspense & espionage films[4] Comments
ERIC AMBLER – Journey Into Fear. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1940. Alfred A. Knopf, US, hardcover, 1940. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and paperback. Movie: RKO, 1943. Also: New World, 1975. TV adaptation: Climax!. Season 3, Episode 2, 11 October 1956.
JOURNEY INTO FEAR. RKO, 1943. Joseph Cotten, Dolores Del Rio, Ruth Warrick, Agnes Moorehead, Jack Durant, Everett Sloane, Orson Welles. Screenplay: Joseph Cotten (and Orson Welles, Richard Collins & Ben Hecht uncredited), based on the novel by Eric Ambler. Directors: Directed by Norman Foster & Orson Welles (the latter uncredited).
With a plot featuring a regular man caught up in a high stakes game of international espionage, Journey Into Fear remains a classic of the spy fiction genre. And for good reason. It gives the reader with a protagonist that most readers can sympathize with, a British naval engineer named Graham. It also provides a recognizable and formidable foe in Nazi Germany. Because Graham has been hired by the neutral Turks to bolster their naval forces, he has come to the attention of the leadership in Berlin.
Not wanting Turkey to enter the war on the side of the Allies, the Nazis dispatch a pair of killers to neutralize Graham and to delay the possible Turkish entry into the Second World War. All Graham wants to do is return from his work in Istanbul back to his native England in safety.
What makes Journey Into Fear work so extraordinarily well is that the novel in actuality features two stories, one external and one internal. The external story follows Graham as he descends into the seedy world of Istanbul nightlife, into a Turkish police station where he comes face to face with the head of the Turkish secret police, and aboard a freighter bound to Genoa. Much as in a locked door mystery, the coterie of strange characters along for the ride provides imaginative readers with plenty to grapple with intellectually. Who might be a Nazi agent? Who might be looking after Graham on behalf of the Turks who want to see him return to England in one piece?
Graham’s internal journey, the one that takes him deep into his innermost fears is the more compelling one. Here’s one example of how Ambler’s utilization of close third person narration allows the reader to get a glimpse of Graham’s particular way of thinking. This is from the latter portion of the novel when he faces down the very real possibility that his death at the hands of Nazi agents is imminent:
It is this aspect of Graham, the psychological one, that fails to make its way into the 1943 RKO cinematic adaptation. In the movie, Graham, rather than a Brit, is an American and he is portrayed as a rather cowardly and charmless doofus by Joseph Cotten. A far cry from his role as the complex, multilayered Eugene Morgan in Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Cotten plays Graham as a rather bland, one dimensional everyman.
True, he is able to summon up the courage to face down his opponents when it becomes absolutely necessary. But Cotten’s Graham is hardly the stuff that the best spy films are made of. Neither a doomed protagonist in the film noir sense of the term, nor an average man forced to do extraordinary things to survive (think: Cary Grant in North by Northwest), the cinematic Graham is somewhere in the vast middle. This makes him a far less compelling character than the psychologically tormented Graham that the reader identifies with in the novel.
The greatest pleasure in reading Ambler’s masterwork in espionage fiction may not necessarily found in the story, compelling though it may be. Rather, it is in Ambler’s sparse but descriptive prose that one can easily lose oneself. Ambler’s prose flows naturally, with each sentence logically progressing from the previous one.
Perhaps it was his training as an engineer which allowed him to map out his paragraphs as if they were each small blueprints for a much larger project. This is not to imply that his language is mechanical in the pejorative sense of the term. Rather, it is to highlight how fine tuned his prose actually is. It neither meanders nor muddles. It just flows. Brilliantly.
March 9th, 2019 at 7:09 pm
Very perceptive review, Jonathan! I prticularly liked your thoughts on Ambler’s writing in the final paragraph.
The protaginists in Welles’ films tend to be unheroic, which may be just as well. Given Welles’ strong visuals, a hero at the center of one would probably be entirely too Wagnerian.
March 9th, 2019 at 9:05 pm
It’s a bit ironic to criticize any film of an Ambler books for an ‘unheroic’ protagonist, since most Ambler novels aren’t about the hero rising to the occasion so much as surviving through a series of incidents where they have practically no impact but instead are buffered about by fate and the characters they encounter.
Cotten in the film is very much buffered by events, acted upon rather than actor, and the ironic lines at the end drive that home even more. Certainly there is a more comic tone to the film than the original novel, and yet it is one of the most faithful adaptations possible.
A special note to the actor actually playing the Nazi assassin. He was not an actor and so reluctant to take the role he insisted all his dialogue be cut, yet the result is a sense of menace far greater than a more charismatic actor might convey.
Welles is not far off the colorful Colonel Haj who also appears in A COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS, one of a handful of continuing characters who weave in and out of Ambler’s novels from the start right until the end.
March 10th, 2019 at 3:17 pm
I’ve never seen the movie, so I can’t comment on that, but when I read the book, it really knocked my socks off. I was about 16 and I’d never read anything like it before. I was really fascinated by it, but back then I wouldn’t have had any idea of how to explain myself as to why.
I haven’t read it since, but now I can see why it gripped me as much as it did. I can also pat my younger self on the back for having such good judgment, even way back then, some 60 years ago.
May 5th, 2020 at 11:03 am
[…] Into Fear has been reviewed, among others, at Mystery File, and The View from the Blue […]