MinistryOfFear

Ministry of Fear is a 1944 film noir directed by Fritz Lang. Based on a novel by Graham Greene, the film tells the story of a man just released from a mental asylum who finds himself caught up in an international spy ring in London during the Blitz, pursued by foreign agents and incriminated for murder; all as a result of having visited a village fair and winning a cake after being given its weight by a fortune teller. The original music for the film was composed by Miklós Rózsa and Victor Young.

The film is set in the England during the 1940-1941 Blitz. Stephen Neale (Milland) is being released from Lembridge Asylum, a hospital for the criminally insane in the small rural English town of Lembridge. The reason for his incarceration is not yet clear, but he has been cured through hypnosis and is glad to be leaving. While waiting in nearby Lembridge for the train into London, Neale visits a village fête hosted by the Mothers of Free Nations. He guesses the weight of a cake (3 pounds, 5 ounces), and then visits the palm reader's tent. He meets Mrs. Bellane (Dyne), an older, plain woman who is telling fortunes. He asks her to ignore the past and tell the future, which startles her. She cryptically tells him to take another guess at the weight of the cake at 4 pounds, 15.5 ounces. Neale does so and wins the cake. The local townspeople are shocked into an eerie silence. A handsome young blond man arrives at the fête, and the cakeseller attempts to retrieve the pastry from Neale and give it to the blond man. Neale refuses to hand it over.

Neale departs Lembridge on the train. A blind farmer (Wyatt) boards at the last moment and rides along in the compartment with him. Neale offers him some cake. When the blind man crumbles his cake rather than eating it, Neale becomes suspicious. The train stops when a Luftwaffe air raid threatens the to destroy the train as well as nearby munitions plant. The farmer, who has only pretended to be blind, knocks Neale down, steals the cake, and flees into the countryside. Neale pursues him. The farmer hides in a ruined cottage, but is killed when a bomb strikes the structure. Neale returns to the train, and finishes his trip to London.

Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943)

Famous now perhaps for a handful of works – Brighton Rock, Our Man in Havana, The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene was a profound stylist and experimental writer. His minor novels are often things of delicate and strange beauty. The Ministry of Fear is such a text, an odd, enigmatic work about salvation, memory, guilt and loyalty set during the blitz. Greene’s protagonist Rowe is a conflicted, grief-stricken man racked with guilt for the killing of his wife in an act of mercy – in a powerful flashback we see them both tacitly acknowledging what he is doing. Rowe attempts to cocoon himself away from his past and from his present, living from day to day and rarely reaching out to anyone. The war is not his business, and he lives mechanically. The masterly opening chapter begins with Rowe visiting a rather forlorn wartime fête in a Bloomsbury square for old time’s sake and ends with him in a daze looking skywards from the basement of his freshly bombed out house. At the fête he wins a cake which, slowly, it becomes obvious contains something of great value to the Germans, and a series of strange events lead to him being sought in connection with another, more violent murder, before being admitted to a sinister nursing home having lost his memory.

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