• Ministry of Fear

4/30/24 (Tues)

Adaptations of Graham Greene’s typically convoluted plots range from the supreme (The Third Man) to the ridiculous (This Gun for Hire), so I didn’t know what to expect here. Moreover, I had read that the script of Fritz Lang’s 1944 flick, based on Greene’s book of the previous year, was considerably rewritten to the director’s intense displeasure after he signed a bad contract. Greene himself reportedly disapproved of the completed film due to some significant deviations in theme. I was ready for anything.

The story starts off smartly as Stephen is released from two years of incarceration in an asylum in rural England for his role in the suicide of his terminally ill wife. (He had purchased poison but couldn’t go through with it; she later found it and killed herself. In the book, Stephen surreptitiously slips the poison into the wife’s milk, freeing her – and himself – from further torment. The resulting guilt haunts him for the rest of the novel, which sounds like a more compelling story; the loss of this theme is what raised Greene’s ire.) He ironically walks out of the peaceful life of the insane asylum into a world still at war, raising the question of just who is sane.

As he awaits his train for London, he visits a village fair in progress. There he wins a cake thanks to a suggestive hint from a fortune teller. As he is leaving, the fair operators tell him that there has been a mistake and try to take the cake back, but he refuses to return it and boards the train. When a man professing to be blind enters his car, Stephen offers to share the dessert. The man responds by beating him with the stick and leaps off the train with the cake. Despite an air raid underway at that moment, Stephen instinctively jumps off and chases after the man, only to see him blasted to bits by a German bomb. All apparently for the want of a cake.

That begins a wild plot involving a Nazi spy ring, microfilm messages placed in cakes and tailored suits, two sibling Austrian refugees who may or may not be allies, an eerie séance, a suitcase bombing, several dramatic deaths, lots of guns, romantic interludes, betrayals and double betrayals, and more. Not every development makes sense, like the sequence with the cake (which, after the blast, is later found intact up a tree in a bird’s nest – seriously), and some sequences seem incomplete, like the private investigator who quickly disappears from the story. The film also has a strangely upbeat ending that seems tacked on from a romantic comedy. But the pacing and constant twists make for an exuberant ride. Lang adds some moody touches with his theatrical use of light and shadow, most notably in the séance, and ably maintains the tension throughout.

Ray Milland is rather bland as the protagonist (he stepped from this into an Oscar-winning turn in The Lost Weekend), but he gets ample help from Hillary Brooke as the sexy séance conductor and Dan Duryea (who seems to die twice) as a spy. The occasional holes in the plot make it difficult to take the film completely seriously, and some of the dialogue has seen better days. A more probing treatment of the novel’s study of remorse would have been welcome. Nevertheless, it’s enjoyable for what it is.