- Norman Foster's Journey Into Fear is a pretty good film that has the disadvantage of not having been directed by Alfred Hitchcock. I do realize that most films were not directed by the Master of Suspense, but this one really would have been a perfect fit. The hero, Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten), is a naive engineer who sort of stumbles his way through the action. There's a silent assassin (Jack Moss) whose presence is frequently announced by his stuttering phonograph. A dramatic murder takes place in the middle of a magic show, and the supporting characters include a persuasive Turk (Everett Sloane), a suspicious German (Eustace Wyatt), a talkative socialist (Frank Readick) and his disapproving wife (Agnes Moorehead), a secret agent (Edgar Barrier), and an overbearing Turkish colonel (Orson Welles).
- Since Graham's wife Stephanie (Ruth Warrick) gets sidelined relatively early in the film, the leading woman is a dancer named Josette (Dolores del Río) who arrives in an absurd cheetah costume that Edith Head never would have allowed. Josette's dance partner Gogo (Jack Durant) is mostly there so that the audience assumes her relationship with Graham is a chaste one, which is a marked difference in approach from anything Hitchcock would have done. In any case, the basic plot is that Graham gets shuffled around Turkey and onto a small cargo boat where it is hoped that he won't be assassinated. Neither the audience nor Graham know who can be trusted, although we certainly remember seeing that man with the phonograph back in the film's very first scene.
- The direction and camerawork in Journey Into Fear are occasionally very inspired to the point that one must wonder if Welles really confined himself only to the roles of actor, producer, and writer. (Foster is known for directing a bunch of Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan films, but that's about it.) Specifically, the opening shot that creeps up the side of a building to the phonograph player is brilliant, as are a few of the tracking shots through the winding hallways of the compact cargo ship. While none of the acting is bad, neither are any of the performances particularly memorable. Two people fall to their deaths from a tall building at the film's end, but personally I feel like Hitchcock would have shown greater restraint by only killing one character that way.
- Welles plays the same character (Colonel Haki) who appeared in The Mask of Dimitrios.
