Anatole Litvak's The Journey

[devon380black]

I watched this movie on TCM a couple of days ago.  I thought it would be boring but after being able to watch it from the start, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  You get caught up in the suspense of it all.  The Journey is about a group of foreigners trying to get to Vienna in the midst of the Hungarian Revolution.  They arrive at one last stop before the border and that's when all hell breaks loose because they get held up by Major Surov, who says that he has to send their passports to the central office or central command for them to have new visas.  Major Surov is a complicated character.  I almost wrote him off as a one-sided villain, but a few scenes in, I got to know his back-story and empathized with his character.

Why don't they make movies like this anymore, by the way? With sentences constructed in a way that you should really listen and read between the lines.  The actors letting you feel the emotion of each scene, making you root for the 'villain', cheer for the protagonist, bite your nails in suspense, grab your heart and squeeze it for all the emotion evoked in a particularly sad scene.  Plus, the music was so sad. :(

Anyway, there were some lines which were salient to me.  Here they are as I heard them:

• "When you hear a man crying in the dark...if you listen carefully, you'll hear what he cries for." - Major Surov
• "That's the sickness of our time, people waving." - Major Surov
• "Anything goes when people meet for the last time." - Major Surov
• "One thing you can never take from me is my privilege to say no." - Paul Kedes
• "It is nobody's fault and it is everybody's fault.  You didn't trust me and I didn't trust you. We can never trust each other." - Major Surov

Although, I'm not sure about the accuracy of the quotes because I didn't think about bringing a piece of paper and a pen with me when I watched the movie.  I just repeated the quotes over and over in my head until I found somewhere to write them down.



Here's a photo of the two main characters, Major Surov (Yul Brynner), and Diana Ashmore (Deborah Kerr).  The movie is in technicolor, I just like the sepia look for the photograph (my edit).