America has entered the second world war. Howard Graham (Joseph Cotten), an American munitions engineer, has completed an assignment to help upgrade guns on ships of the Turkish navy. He and his wife are in Istanbul, en route for home. German agents are attempting to assassinate him to prevent his return. Colonel Haki (Orson Welles), the head of the Turkish secret police, assists Graham to escape by boat to Batumi, on the Soviet Black Sea coast. But the Nazis are on the boat....
Good enough to watch and enjoy, this is an overrated film, riding on Welles's reputation (as the uncredited director) and some perfunctory early film noir elements. The plot is riddled with loose ends. The ridiculous White Russian, Kopeikin (Everett Sloane), fails to warn Graham's wife (Ruth Warrick) of his escape by boat - Haki makes a point of it, but it has no obvious significance to the story. Haki has a reputation as a ladies' man, but the story of his train journey to Batumi with Mrs Graham is not told. Graham says he likes the Turks, he has been working there, he must be a man of some experience, yet he allows Kopeikin to take charge of his stay in Istanbul and drag him off to a Russian night club. These early scenes are dominated by Kopeikin, who seems, at this stage, to have a key role in the plot, but then he is suddenly dropped and the entire pantomime seems to have been created only to stage the bungled shooting, to which Kopeikin seems to have no relation. Again, the main purpose of the recurring theme of Graham's attraction to Josette Martel (Dolores del Rio) is to engineer his perfunctory, unconvincing, search of the cabin of the killer, Banat (Jack Moss). In 'The Third Man', Cotten portrayed a naive American with total conviction, but in this earlier film he is loud and just plain stupid, most notably in his histrionic behaviour on the ship, a caricature of the American abroad. Welles's performance as Haki is surprisingly wooden. A relatively small part, it ought to have offered scope for Welles to play up a sinister Turkish master of spies, but he is just plain dull in the role.
Although the film does not hang together, and fails to create real tension, it has some good things. The dark cinematography (Karl Struss) is atmospheric, especially in the chase in the torrential rain. The hints at a looseness in the relationship between Graham and his wife are surprising and interesting. The exotic and cosmopolitan locations are convincingly evoked, with Turkish, Russian and French spoken where called for. Not an uninteresting film, as any film involving Welles must be, but a bit of a mish-mash.
Good enough to watch and enjoy, this is an overrated film, riding on Welles's reputation (as the uncredited director) and some perfunctory early film noir elements. The plot is riddled with loose ends. The ridiculous White Russian, Kopeikin (Everett Sloane), fails to warn Graham's wife (Ruth Warrick) of his escape by boat - Haki makes a point of it, but it has no obvious significance to the story. Haki has a reputation as a ladies' man, but the story of his train journey to Batumi with Mrs Graham is not told. Graham says he likes the Turks, he has been working there, he must be a man of some experience, yet he allows Kopeikin to take charge of his stay in Istanbul and drag him off to a Russian night club. These early scenes are dominated by Kopeikin, who seems, at this stage, to have a key role in the plot, but then he is suddenly dropped and the entire pantomime seems to have been created only to stage the bungled shooting, to which Kopeikin seems to have no relation. Again, the main purpose of the recurring theme of Graham's attraction to Josette Martel (Dolores del Rio) is to engineer his perfunctory, unconvincing, search of the cabin of the killer, Banat (Jack Moss). In 'The Third Man', Cotten portrayed a naive American with total conviction, but in this earlier film he is loud and just plain stupid, most notably in his histrionic behaviour on the ship, a caricature of the American abroad. Welles's performance as Haki is surprisingly wooden. A relatively small part, it ought to have offered scope for Welles to play up a sinister Turkish master of spies, but he is just plain dull in the role.
Although the film does not hang together, and fails to create real tension, it has some good things. The dark cinematography (Karl Struss) is atmospheric, especially in the chase in the torrential rain. The hints at a looseness in the relationship between Graham and his wife are surprising and interesting. The exotic and cosmopolitan locations are convincingly evoked, with Turkish, Russian and French spoken where called for. Not an uninteresting film, as any film involving Welles must be, but a bit of a mish-mash.