Ministry of Fear (1944)

I saw Ministry of Fear several years ago, and I remember enjoying it. I’ve always liked Ray Milland, and he is great in the starring role of Stephen Neale. Dan Duryea, another favorite of mine, plays one of the supporting characters, Cost, who also goes by the name of Travers. Duryea is in only a few sequences in the film, but he is in command every time he is on the screen, and he is a lot of fun to watch.

I was really surprised by the plot when I saw Ministry of Fear again recently. I guess I didn’t remember the story line all that well, but that turned out to be a plus because it was like watching the film for the first time. The twists and turns were one surprise after another, and that’s quite an achievement for any film, let alone one that I have already seen, even if it was several years ago.

At the start of the film, Stephen Neale is released from the Lembridge Asylum, where he was incarcerated after being convicted of the mercy killing of his wife. He wants to go straight to London, even though it is being bombed almost every night by the Germans (it’s the World War II blitz of London and other targets in the United Kingdom). But before he leaves Lembridge, he attends a charity fête hosted by the Mothers of Free Nations. He enters a raffle to guess the weight of a cake, which will be awarded to the person whose guess is the closest to its actual weight—or so it is advertised. Stephen Neale wins the cake based on mistaken identity and happenstance: He visits a fortune-teller at the fair who thinks he is the spy sent to pick up the cake. Neale uses a particular phrase, a set of passwords, in their conversation quite by accident, but it was the code that the spy was supposed to use. The fortune-teller gives Neale the message about the cake’s weight that was meant for Cost (Dan Duryea’s character).

(This article about Ministry of Fear contains spoilers.)

Neale takes the cake and all his belongings on the train for London. He shares his train compartment with a blind man who is interested in the cake and accepts a slice when Neale offers one to him. But the blind man doesn’t taste it; he only squeezes his slice of cake between his fingers. Neale can’t help notice the mess, and his reaction is amusing, but he doesn’t say anything or ask any questions. When an air raid forces the train to stop, the man pounces on the remaining cake and takes off with it into the countryside. Neale chases him, but he has to stop after the man (who was never blind to begin with) spots him and starts shooting. A bomb kills the man and presumably destroys the cake. Neale gives up and returns to the train.

In London, Neale hires a private investigator because of the attempt on his life, and the first place he and the private investigator visit is the home office of the Mothers of Free Nations. Neale is hoping that the charity workers will have some information about the fortune-teller, Mrs. Bellane, that he visited at the charity fête in Lembridge. Willi and Carla Hilfe, the brother and sister running the charity, have no idea who Neale is talking about, but they are willing to help. Neale and Willi Hilfe decide to visit Mrs. Bellane and end up attending a séance. The woman they meet as the host of the séance introduces herself as Mrs. Bellane, but it’s not the same woman who read Neale’s fortune in Lembridge.

Cost, the same man who showed up in Lembridge claiming that he won the cake, is shot and killed at the séance. All the séance attendees accuse Stephen Neale because he was the only one who let go of the hands of his neighbors and broke the circle; that is, he was the only one whose hands were free to use a weapon. After his incarceration in the Lembridge Asylum for the mercy killing of his wife, Neale wants to avoid getting involved with the police again, which proves nearly impossible when he attends the séance. Now he is on the run in London to avoid arrest, and he’s not sure who to trust. It’s hardly the life of peace and quiet he had hoped for after his release from the asylum.

Like Neale, I found myself suspecting almost everyone, and this suspicion starts at the beginning, at the charity fête in Lembridge. When he wins the cake, everyone stops to watch him in silence as he carries it off. Everyone at the séance in London is quick to accuse Neale of a murder that he did not commit. He doesn’t know who to trust and how the cake could be connected to his current situation. Neale has become the target of a Nazi spy ring, but he and viewers have no idea why. Much later in the film, Neale learns that the cake contains microfilm of British embarkation plans, and the Nazi spies will do almost anything to get it back and smuggle it out of England.

It is very hard to keep track of the characters and who knows what. Viewers are put in Stephen Neale’s place. They learn the facts as he does, and thus it is easy to sympathize with him. The fact that he is the target of a Nazi spy ring increases sympathy for Neale. But being the target of a spy ring is a very dangerous business. Neale is knocked unconscious twice, shot at by a man posing as a blind farmer, and nearly killed by a bomb in an exploding suitcase. And we, as viewers, are as confused as he is.

A predicament like the one Neale faces often translates into a convoluted plot. The main character goes from one clue to the next, following the evidence until he or she can put the whole picture together. Add to this a very sophisticated spy ring whose members are trying to avoid detection and keep every other character in the dark, and Neale (and viewers, too) have a very difficult task trying to sort through the evidence. Ministry of Fear thus lends itself to repeat viewings just to get all the details straight, but it’s well worth the effort.

The film has some humorous touches, too. For instance, Stephen Neale finds his first visit to the fortune-teller in Lembridge amusing (he doesn’t know yet what she represents). He’s not a believer in the occult, but he is willing to hear what she has to say and believes their talk is just pleasant banter. Neale offers a piece of cake to the blind man sent after him to recover the cake while on the train to London, but instead of eating it, he smooshes it between his fingers, to Neale’s bafflement. Neale eventually finds Cost in London, but he is really a tailor named Travers with a pair of oversize tailor’s shears that alternates between funny and threatening.

The film is based on a Graham Greene novel, The Ministry of Fear, which I had not read before seeing the film. (Now that I have read it, I plan to write about it next.) Greene apparently hated this film adaptation of his novel because it waters down the novel’s depiction of a man who poisoned his wife and suffers terrible guilt after the murder. To be honest, I don’t think the guilt that the main character suffers in the novel is a very big plot point—in the film or in the novel. The film tells the story economically, but it doesn’t eliminate the murder and the guilt entirely. It does have a Hollywood ending, and that’s the part that I think would have bothered the author more than anything else. The film’s conclusion is quick and humorous, with none of the moral ambiguity that permeates throughout the novel and its conclusion.

The film is such a wonderful story in its own right, however, that I am not sorry I saw it several times before I read the novel, even though I usually prefer reading the novel before seeing its film adaptation. In spite of its ending, the film is a pure noir story of paranoia and desperation, of a man who is perpetually in the wrong place at the wrong time. I want to see it again now that I have read the novel.

December 21, 1944, release date  •  Directed by Fritz Lang  •  Screenplay by Seton I. Miller  •  Based on the novel The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene  •  Music by Victor Young  •  Edited by Archie Marshek  •  Cinematography by Henry Sharp

Ray Milland as Stephen Neale  •  Marjorie Reynolds as Carla Hilfe  •  Carl Esmond as Willi Hilfe/Mr. Macklin  •  Hillary Brooke as Mrs. Bellane #2  •  Percy Waram as Inspector Prentice  •  Dan Duryea as Cost/Travers  •  Alan Napier as Dr. J. M. Forrester  •  Erskine Sanford as George Rennit  •  Mary Field as Martha Panteel  •  Aminta Dyne as Mrs. Bellane #1

Distributed by Paramount Pictures  •  Produced by Paramount Pictures