'JOURNEY INTO FEAR'.......MERCURY RISING....THE 'KANE' GANG BACK TOGETHER AGAIN.......

 Journey Into Fear (1943)    Oh how we wished we had nicer things to say about this brief, but vivid little thriller......a reunion of sorts for the star-crossed erratic genius Orson Welles and his mighty Mercury players.......the people who dazzled us as they rewrote cinema history in 'Citizen Kane'.........

              Pardon us while we sigh for what might have been.....what this collections of striking characters and beautifully crafted individual scenes could have added up to if they ever coalesced into a fully realized feature length film.

               At 68 minutes, it plays out like a very long trailer of a 2 hour film you'd need to see in order to understand all the twists and turns of its plot.......

                But this is all you get, with some periodic flashes of brilliance from the acting ensemble made up of Welles and his 'Kane' chohorts, Everett Sloane, Joseph Cotton, Ruth Warrick, and Agnes Moorhead.

                Cotton wrote the screenplay himself from a an Eric Ambler spy novel and plays an American armaments exec targeted by Nazi assassins. These nefarious, creepy types relentlessly pursue Cotton from Istanbul on to a tramp steamer loaded with equally memorable (and equally suspicious ) characters.

                Plenty of stuff to admire here.......starting with a wordless pre-credits sequence showing a pudgy assassin loading up for a hit, ignoring his constantly skipping gramaphone......a chilling way to underline the depth of his single-mindedness.  (It looked to us like an early pre-cursor of the teasers that open the Bond films.)

                Then things swiftly move on to a great clever sequence in which Cotton finds himself in the assassin's crosshairs while participating in a 'Now You See Him, Now You Don't' nightclub magic act. (And once again, it reminded us of the kind of set-piece you'd see 007 sucked into.....)

                 More noir-ish maneuvering goes on in the tramp steamer and finally winds up in Batumi, Georga with Cotton and his tormentors facing off on a high hotel ledge in the middle of pounding rainstorm. 

                  As if the goings-on aren't exotic and sinister enough, Welles pops in with a predictably hammy turn as Col Haki, the Turkish cop who knows's more about what's happening in the story than anybody else.....for all the good it does anybody.

                  All of this is huge fun to watch, even if none of it ever connects to anything approaching a coherent storyline.  It stays what it is, collection of great scenes in search of movie to go with them, with all of the linking material probably left on the cutting room floor......(most likely the same kind of editorial butchery that RKO exacted on Welles' 'The Magnificent Ambersons')

                 But even Orson Welles' misfires, mistakes and mishandled films still remain essential viewing for any true cinema buff......so BQ gives 3 stars (***) for these existing chunks of what could have been as powerful a noir as "The Stranger"........there go our sighs again........