Movies: “The Journey” (1959)

What happens when Russia invades a nation in Europe?

The Journey is uniquely interesting and thought-provoking. Directed by a man born in Kiev when the city was located in Soviet Russia, now in Ukraine (which was invaded by Russia three years ago today) and written by a man born in Hungary, the 1959 motion picture depicts a band of international travelers and tourists detained by Communists during the 1956 uprising of Hungarians in Budapest when Soviet Russia invaded. The film has been forgotten. Several factors make it worth watching.

First, it re-pairs Yul Brunner and Deborah Kerr following their pairing in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical movie, The King and I. The Journey features songs and dances, too, though not for frivolity. Like White Nights, The White Crow, We the Living—with which The Journey shares a distinctive type of love triangle—and The Lives of Others, the movie depicts attempts to escape or survive under Communist dictatorship. Second, the cast includes E.G. Marshall, Robert Morley and pre-Andy Griffith Show Ronny Howard and others in a largely excellent cast of mysterious fellow travelers thrown together under Soviet oppression. Third, The Journey marks the movie debut of Jason Robards (A Thousand Clowns, All the President’s Men, Max Dugan Returns, Philadelphia).

The movie begins with the roaring sound of screaming fighter jets at the dawn of the Jet Age amid the so-called Cold War between East and West, followed by the incongruous sight of passenger jets going in reverse—airplanes going backward—as Soviet Russia invades and locks life, including travel, speech and assembly, down in Budapest during an uprising of rebels against the totalitarian state. A man in leather coat and cap enters the picture. Barbed wire goes up. The camera cuts to Westerners asleep in the airport. It’s a perfect start for a movie about Soviet enslavement, American appeasement and what Ayn Rand calls the cult of moral grayness.

Rebels can be heard in a pirate broadcast on the radio being alternately pitied and admired by listeners, and, in an important scene, one of them boards the bus upon which the band of Westerners rides to escape from Hungary for Austria. An American played by E.G. Marshall in a layered, powerful supporting performance, offers the rebel a piece of chocolate; she looks at him with disgust and replies: “We need guns, not chocolate.” This scene evokes Klaus Kinski’s boxcar prisoner in Soviet Russia in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago.

Like the train in that 1965 movie, the bus in The Journey is central to what each passenger sees and learns on the way to enslavement or emancipation. Coming to a stop in a Hungarian village, the international passengers, each with interesting pasts, motives and disclosures, witness and listen to people who break out in song. Context matters; they sing as they stand after being corralled by Soviet soldiers onto a truck for transport. Where to? The implication is: mass death.

The camera cuts to a huge, red star above the town square—concretizing Communism as the death premise—as the faces of each bus passenger slowly watch the living sing on the death truck in solidarity. Enter Yul Brynner, a top soldier riding on a black horse in a leather jacket and cap, in anachronistic contrast to the truck. Moments after seeing what becomes of ones that resist dictatorship, the would-be Western refugees aboard the halted bus see their jailer for the first time.

As in Florian Henkel Von Donnersmarck’s brilliant 2006 film The Lives of Others, one of them stands out to Brynner’s Communist in charge. Played by Deborah Kerr, she’s the one who dares to venture that she’s “speaking for myself.” Like Kira to Andrei in We the Living, Kerr’s motivated to speak and act up against the state: the man with whom she’s in love (Robards) is dying and deserves to be saved.

In subtle, thinly layered scenes, the conflict grounded in the developing love triangle forms tension leading to violence, sexuality and crimes of passion. Passengers gather in an expropriated hotel—the property owner and proprietor plays a small but pivotal role—and alluring, magnetic Brynner plays host to the prisoners at an uncomfortable dinner, notifying the “guests” that you can’t always get what you want so you might as well brace for not getting what you need. Before you know it, Brynner’s Soviet major’s revealing his own psychological-philosophical premises; in a dinner speech about curiosity and his time in North America, he gives a hint to what makes him tick.

Nightmares, disclosures amid dares, gunshots, death and talk of mutiny as Brynner swaggers and commands the passengers—ordering them to fill out forms and relinquish their guns—tightens the tension, which leads to “something else…”

As it does, the Russian sense of life, i.e., that observing sadness is “the best way of feeling good,” lamenting “a man crying”, vodka, folk dance and “being trapped” sets up what’s bound to happen as Brynner’s exhilarating performance poignantly delivers the line that saying goodbye is “the sickness of our time.” The waltz, the watchtower, the sound of the hooves of a horse ensue and animate this otherwise stilted movie.

The most affecting scene takes place to cash in on Brynner’s earlier forecast as Robards and Brynner dramatize that the man who cries can remain unconquered while the man who can’t is barely alive; tenderness between two men climaxes the trip as song comes to life. Kerr is justifiably tenuous. Robards is perfectly pained. Marshall’s memorable as the one who thinks. But The Journey is Yul Brynner’s movie.

With Anatole Litvak directing George Tabori’s screenplay about escaping altruist-collectivist tyranny—unlike in We the Living, Doctor Zhivago and The Lives of Others, the political philosophy of Communism is unfortunately never made explicit—Brynner infuses his vitality into a distinctly Russian dance of death. The result is a timely and tragic love story about what’s lost and gained along the way.

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