Directed by: Fritz Lang

Released: October 1944

Cast: Ray Milland, Marjorie Renolds, Carl Esmond, Hillary Brooke, Percy Waram, Dan Duryea, and Alan Napier as Dr. Forrester.

Spoilers. There are a few.

You could say Ministry of Fear is something of a flawed masterpiece. Simply put, Ministry of Fear is a wonderfully eccentric film where the climax can’t bear-up under the weight of the eccentricity.

Just released from an insane asylum, Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) buys a train ticket to London. While waiting for the train, charity garden fete put on by the Mothers of Free Nations, attracts Neale’s attention. A fortune teller gives Neale the correct weight for a ‘guess the weight of a cake’ contest, which he wins.

On the train to London, a blind man joins Neale, with whom Neale shares his newly acquired cake. At this moment the Germans bomb a nearby munitions factory, stopping the train. The blind man beats Neale with his cane, grabs the cake and flees the train. Neale, still dazed by the beating, pursues the no longer blind man.

The no longer blind man fires a few shots at Neale then takes refuge in a bombed-out farmhouse. Only to have the house suffer a direct hit from a German bomb. All Neale can find is the no longer blind man’s gun.

After making his way to London, Neale engages a detective to help him find out what is going on, regarding the fortune teller, the Mothers of Free Nations, and beside being made with eggs what’s so special about the cake. The trail leads Neale to the founders of the Mothers of Free Nations. A brother and sister duo of Austrian refugees (Carl Esmond and Marjorie Reynolds). Willi and Carla direct Neale to the fortune teller, who turns out to not be the same fortune teller but a one Mrs. Bellane (Hillary Brooke) who is about to conduct a séance. Invited, Neale joins the seance.

During the séance a shot rings out and a man is dead. All fingers point to Neale, who makes a daring escape, and is now a fugitive of the police. End of act one.

It’s been a strange nearly 24 hours for Neale. However, being bombed, arrested, betrayed, falling in love, busting a spy ring still lay ahead for Neale. Neale is suspected of everything, the least of which being mentally unbalanced because of his recent two year stay at the asylum for ending the suffering of his terminally ill wife. But, that doesn’t help.

The sequence of these events flows beautifully as everything seems to come out of the blue. From an insane asylum to a garden fete, to winning a cake, to being beaten by a blind man, then seeing the blind man, who’s not really a blind man, get blown up, to a séance where a guy gets shot. The only thing missing perhaps is trying to contact the now deceased blind man to find out what’s going on. But that might be going too far.

Like any good thriller, we learn things bit by bit, piecing the puzzle together, which Ministry of Fear does very well. Making these incredibly unusual events somehow fit together when logically they shouldn’t. Brought to a tailor’s shop Neale faces a possible showdown, and the eccentricity does not disappoint with the dialing of a phone with a pair grotesquely large scissors. From there the film just goes to a rather routine and abrupt climax.

Ministry of Fear is screaming for a climax on par with taking place on top of the Statue of Liberty, or a crashing trans-Atlantic clipper. What we get doesn’t even come close to that, after what has been up until then, Fritz Lang’s unique take on a Hitchcock thriller.

The film is very much a Fritz Lang film. Like most films produced during the war, production is confined to the soundstage. Finely crafted, Ministry of Fear takes advantage of this, creating distinctive, almost nightmarish environments. But unlike other Lang films, the conclusion of Ministry of Fear just fizzles and burps.

Having said that, Ministry of Fear should not be dismissed just because of a weak ending. The film’s set-up and build-up is so eccentric and different that perhaps no ending could live up to what has come before it. So rather than go for a spectacular finish, it’s possibly more appropriate to have a more ‘realistic’, by the book finale.

Regardless, it’s still a satisfying movie, perhaps made better if the cake recipe was included at the end. That would be the true icing on the cake.

Ministry of Fear is available on DVD and Blu-ray, and can be streamed on the Criterion Channel.