The Orson Welles Movie That Was Never Available on DVD — Until Now
Jim Hemphill
The second half of 2024 has been very good to Orson Welles fans, with stunning new high-def releases of “Macbeth” on Blu-ray and “The Lady From Shanghai” on 4K UHD. The latest great news for Welles enthusiasts is another physical media release, and one that has been a long time coming: the Warner Archive Blu-ray of the 1943 espionage thriller “Journey Into Fear.”
“Journey Into Fear” was the third and final film Welles made under the RKO contract that commenced with “Citizen Kane” and soured with the commercial failure (largely orchestrated by a new studio regime that resented the freedoms given to Welles) of “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Like “Ambersons,” it’s a mutilated effort taken out of Welles’ hands during post-production, and it doesn’t entirely hang together as a movie — Welles himself even said that, at one point, a character who died two reels earlier can be seen briefly reemerging on screen.
Yet even with the studio mangling that left much of its plot in shambles, “Journey Into Fear” is a rousing piece of entertainment, filled with high style and scenery-chewing fun from Welles stock company members Joseph Cotten (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Welles), Ruth Warrick, Everett Sloane, Agnes Moorehead, and Welles himself as a Turkish policeman. While it doesn’t have the artistic ambition of “Kane” or “Ambersons,” it’s a fun companion piece to those films as a kind of escapist breather — there’s something infectiously enjoyable about seeing Welles and his Mercury players applying their talents to a breezy, modest programmer.
Unlike “Kane” and “Ambersons,” Welles didn’t sign “Journey Into Fear” as a director, handing the heavy lifting off to his associate Norman Foster. There’s been a lot of debate and confusion over the years about just how responsible Welles was for the film, as it has a lot in common with his earlier work — the deep-focus compositions and low angles, the dynamic camera moves, etc. Given Foster’s far lower profile in film history, Welles has tended to be given credit for ghost-directing the film despite his own protestations that it was Foster’s and Foster’s alone.
The truth seems to be that Welles supervised the film as a producer and had a major influence on several of its graphic elements, such as the design of the ship where much of the action takes place. Cotten plays an American engineer who gets swept up in a Nazi plot and takes refuge on a vessel where he encounters a variety of colorful characters, all of whom are shot through claustrophobic framing devices that undoubtedly echo the visual language of Welles’ directorial work.
Welles admitted that he directed at least some of the movie when mentioning a scene shot on a ledge, claiming that it was just because no one else could fit there and whoever happened to be closest to the camera stepped in as director. As in the case of Tobe Hooper, Steven Spielberg, and “Poltergeist,” the conflicting reports proliferating over the years make it impossible to truly know how much of what Welles was doing on “Journey Into Fear” was actual directing, how much of it was being a strong producer, and how much was the director being influenced by the style of the man who gave him the job.
What is inarguable is that “Journey Into Fear” has the same cocktail of intrigue, expressive camerawork, and political commentary that would characterize later Welles works like “The Stranger,” “Mr. Arkadin,” and “The Trial”; it’s also compelling as a last Hollywood gasp for Welles and his Mercury company at RKO, where for a glorious few years, Welles had all the creative and financial resources he needed to let his imagination run wild.
Given all of this, it’s astonishing that “Journey Into Fear” has never been released on DVD or Blu-ray in the United States until now, and it’s barely streamed aside from its intermittent appearances on the Turner Classic Movies app. Thankfully, the Warner Archive disc is worth the wait, with a flawless transfer that carefully preserves all of the nuances and textures of Karl Struss’ stunning black-and-white cinematography; there are also several Mercury radio programs on the Blu-ray, including Welles’ famous adaptation of “Dracula” from the late 1930s.
Hopefully, this release — coming so close to the new “Macbeth” and “Lady from Shanghai” discs — isn’t the end of a current Welles physical media deluge but just the beginning.
“Journey Into Fear” is now available on Blu-ray from the Warner Archive collection.
