Like the cake that starts the chain of events in “Ministry of Fear,” Ray Milland’s performance is perhaps too sweet for the film to be truthful to its title. Instead of being afraid, we’re intrigued, and we spend our time trying to figure out who’s who. Perhaps a more fitting title would have been Ministry of Mystery.
Some elements of the film are too convoluted for its own good, others are surprisingly clever. Some feel very dated, others scarily prescient and modern, like the talk about the sick’s wife “mercy killing.”
Overall, it feels like Fritz Lang was too busy making the complicated plot understandable and forgot to take full advantage of the wonderful cast, specifically Dan Duryea, who’s killed way too soon.
Nevertheless, the film deserves a second viewing, if only to watch the creepy opening scene at the Mothers of Free Nation fundraiser fair, or the climax, when a single bullet pierces the darkness of the screen. 3.5 stars.
Ray Milland falls down the metaphorical rabbit hole in Fritz Lang’s peculiarly entertaining Ministry of Fear, a winding tale of mystery and intrigue spanning insane asylums, bookshops, tailor shops, explosions, seances, cake, and Nazi spies, among many other treats. Adapted from a novel by English author Graham Greene, the film is a maze of quirky characters and fake personas against a backdrop of World War II bombings. When Stephen Neale (Milland) is released from the mental asylum where he’s been living since his wife’s death, his first stop is a local fair where he wins a cake that was meant to be won by a mysterious man who arrives angrily just as Neale is leaving. On the train to London, the cake is stolen by a man pretending to be blind, who knocks Neale out and leaves him for dead. When Neale goes to file a complaint with Mothers of Free Nations, the charity that hosted the fair, the brother and sister who run the organization introduce him to a network of shady figures who travel in a world of secrets. More than in his many other films, Lang here seems to make extensive use of insert shots to create Hitchcockian suspense, while art direction and set design — from the asylum gate to the field of bombs to the Bellane mansion — bring an often dreamy, magical quality to the proceedings.
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