User Reviews

Even at the height of the Cold War, there were relatively few Hollywood films about the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe; "The Journey", set during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, is one of the few exceptions. A multinational group of foreign tourists find themselves trapped in Budapest by the outbreak of the revolution. There are no flights out of the country, but the Soviet authorities organise a bus to transport them across the Austrian border. They are detained, however, in a small border town by the local Soviet commander, Major Surov, and forced to stay in a local hotel.

Among the group are an aristocratic Englishwoman, Lady Diana Ashmore, and her friend and travelling companion Henry Fleming. Although Fleming also claims to be English, and is travelling on a British passport, it soon becomes clear that he is an impostor. His real name is Paul Kedes and he is a Hungarian citizen who was imprisoned and tortured by the Communist regime. He was released from jail by the revolutionaries and is attempting to flee the country with the help of Lady Diana, his former lover. Surov is well aware that Fleming is not what he seems, but he hesitates to arrest him.

A number of reviewers have commented on the links between this film and Guy de Maupassant's story "Boule de Suif", although the emphasis is rather different. In de Maupassant's story the main character was a prostitute and the moral dilemma confronting her was whether she should obtain the freedom of herself and her fellow passengers by sleeping with a German officer. (That story was set during the Franco-Prussian War). In "The Journey", the main moral dilemma explored is whether Diana should obtain the freedom of herself and her fellow passengers by betraying Kedes to the authorities (as some of them urge her when they discover the truth about his identity).

Contrary to one reviewer's description of him, Surov is not "mean and nasty". The German officer in "Boule de Suif" is certainly a nasty piece of work; like many Frenchmen post 1871, de Maupassant clearly believed that Germanophobia was an essential element of French patriotism. Surov, however, is a more complex character, basically a decent man despite the nature of the regime he serves. During the Cold War it was unusual for a Red Army officer to be portrayed sympathetically by Hollywood; the West occasionally made films which portrayed Russian characters in a good light, but these were normally set either in pre-revolutionary Russia ("War and Peace") or based on works by anti-Communist writers such as Pasternak ("Dr Zhivago") or Solzhenitsyn ("One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich").

The film reunited Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner, who had previously starred together in "The King and I". Both are good here, especially Brynner who brings out the various sides of Surov's character. He can be domineering and frightening, but also cultured and capable of decency. He has always been a dedicated Communist and a loyal supporter of the Soviet system, seeing the Russian forces in Hungary not as occupiers but as liberators who have freed the country from Fascism. He reacts to the Hungarian Revolution with the same baffled incomprehension with which a dedicated and conscientious British colonial official might have reacted to, say, the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya or the EOKA uprising in Cyprus. For the first time he begins to question his loyalties as he realises that for many Hungarians the events of 1945 represented not liberation but merely the exchange of one form of oppression for another.

Kerr's Diana is gracious and feminine as well as strong-minded and determined. The film also features a number of other well-known names- E.G. Marshall, Ann Jackson, Jason Robards, Anouk Aimee-, some of them in only minor roles. One contribution which stood out was from Robert Morley as the pompous, officious Englishman who appoints himself the leader of, and spokesman for, the group of travellers.

My main problem with the film is that it perhaps tried to follow de Maupassant too closely by having Surov fall in love with Diana, thus giving him another reason to detain the travellers for as long as possible. For me the Surov-Diana-Kedes love triangle was an unnecessary diversion from the film's more interesting political themes. I felt that the film might have been more interesting had it tried to explore the causes of the Hungarian Revolution in more detail. I have no problem with a film which portrays an individual Soviet officer in a good light, but I felt that the character of Surov needed to be placed in context. Had all Soviet officials in the country, and their counterparts in the Hungarian Communist Party, been as liberal and decent as he then the Revolution would never have broken out. Hungarian viewers may well feel annoyed that one of the most tragic- and heroic- episodes in their country's history, their fight against an oppressive Stalinist regime, is here reduced to little more than the background to another flirtation between the stars of "The King and I". 6/10

Though I like what this film is trying to do, I feel the execution was wanting. Outside of Yul Brynner's Major Surov, the other characters were too flat to be interesting. The film is overlong and could have been cut by fifteen minutes at the very least.

One of the strong points was the chemistry between Kerr and Brynner. You can certainly feel the sexual attraction there, and the kiss they share at the end of the film is hotter than any sex scene ever could be. But Kerr's character is not fleshed out enough for the romantic aspect to really work. Unlike Ilsa in Casablanca (1942), the character's struggle between two men is not compelling nor do you really feel sorry for her.

Overall, the only thing the film has going for it is Brynner's character. Everything else is not worth the time.

As a big Dostoyevsky fan, I had always been disappointed with Hollywood's halfhearted attempts to get into the Russian romantic aesthetic -- case in point, Yul Brynner as Dmitri Karamazov. I had thought the whole problem was a poor casting decisions, but then I saw Yul as Major Surov and changed my mind. When given an intelligent script to work with, he suddenly came alive and was as noble, sexy, and conflicted as you could ever want a Neurotic Russian Officer to be! So he was a better Dmitri as Major Surov than he was as Dmitri. But that's because writer Tabori actually gave Yul, as the Conflicted Russian Officer, the kind of Conflicted Russian Officer lines that are worthy of real literature, and that have real meaning and pathos in them. For example, a propos of folk music, he says musingly, "You hear a man crying in the dark. And if you listen carefully enough, you know what he cries for. You look surprised, Lady Ashmore. Despite what you may have heard, tractors and Marxism aren't the only things the Russian cares for. There is always time for music."

Brilliant!!

Produced and directed by Anatole Litvak, and written by George Tabori, this unique Cold War drama is difficult to describe. There is a romance element to it which doesn't quite work, though the motivations for Yul Brynner's interest in Deborah Kerr's character are clear: he's been away from home too long. That plot-line notwithstanding, there is a very real feel given for the time and place, Russian occupied Hungary in 1956, that gives the film a certain truth which makes it hard to quit watching once one has become engaged in it. Unfortunately, the story drags on for at least 20 minutes too long. The film marks the only other pairing of these actors besides The King and I (1956).

A group of foreigners have found themselves unable to fly out of Budapest because of the political situation, hence they are trapped and given no choice besides the promised passage by the occupying Russian forces. They are put on a bus ostensibly headed for Vienna, but they are detained just short of their destination by a Major Surov (Brynner), who wants to make sure no natives are escaping amidst the group.

Robert Morley, playing a British television journalist, serves as the defacto spokesman for the tourists which include an old acquaintance of his, Lady Diana Ashmore (Kerr). Ashmore is in fact smuggling an Hungarian friend of hers, traveling as American Paul Fleming (Jason Robards Jr., in his film debut) but fooling no one for long, out of the country. She feels she owes a debt to him because, through a complicated series of events, he was held prisoner and tortured by the Russians in part due to his association with her years previously. An American family which includes E.G. Marshall, Anne Jackson, and their two sons (one of which is played by a four year old Ron Howard in his first credited role) is among the twelve others being detained by the Major.

The drama begins when, for reasons that are not explained right away, Major Surov decides not to send the foreigners' passports to headquarters. That would be the usual procedure which would have allowed these travelers the most expeditious way out of Hungary. But Surov, having been in charge of this border town for 2 years, is lonely for human conversation, perhaps even more. He is quickly frustrated when his "guests", led by a judicious Morley, are unwilling to engage him in adult discourse, and instead act like apolitical, humble prisoners.

The fact that Fleming can't present himself for meals - he'd been injured in his escape - and that it's Lady Ashmore that seems to care for him, also intrigues the Major. It later becomes clear that Surov was immediately taken with/smitten by Diana such that his subsequent decision-making was/is hindered by his (unrequited?) attraction to her. When the Major seems to have figured out that Fleming is not who he appears to be, Diana makes a fateful decision of her own which leads to an escape attempt and more.

I've only just caught up with this one so any 'cutting edge' element it may have had at the time - it was made three years after those Russian tanks cut a swathe through Hungary - is long diluted and there is more interest in the cast - from Ron Howard in only his second film, to Gerard Oury who would direct the first of many fine movies the following year, to Ann Jackson, a fine stage actress who was sparing with he film work, to E.G. Marshall, another stage actor, one of the 12 Angry Men and starring on TV in The Defenders at the time this was shot, to Anouk Aimee, a fine French actress yet to go supernova with Un Homme et une femme to Jason Robards who'd made a film in 1946 and waited 13 years to do another, filling the years between with standout Broadway performances in The Iceman Cometh and Long Day's Journey Into Night. As has been noted George Tabori's screenplay owes more than a little to Maupassant's Boule de suif, which also formed the basis of Stagecoach and viewed today it's a pleasant enough diversion but little more.

I really like that this was shot on location in Vienna, it added a very real feel to it. Also, they used a number of European actors so physically they look authentic.

I found it more like a play in that the timing of some of the happenings in reality would be next to impossible. Also like a play, and I'm surprised no one has mentioned this in their reviews, is that Yul Brynner is eventually killed by a Hungarian resistance fighter who looks almost identical to Deborah Kerr who he is obsessed with so I suspect there was some dark message in that, and come to think of it, it's even darker in that the same resistance fighter had just killed Brynners' horse the night before so that was a kind of premonition. The ending, if it were reality, would be just too much of a coincidence -- Brynner takes Deborah Kerr and her companions to a bridge and sets them free into Vienna but just after they cross the bridge, the Bizarro World Deborah Kerr freedom fighter emerges from the bushes and kills Brynner while he's getting into his jeep. How did she know he was going to be there at that exact moment? Anyways, aside from a few ludicrous coincidences, it's a decent movie worth watching in my opinion.