Fear (Lindsley Parsons Productions, Monogram, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 30) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post (afflicted with a commercial about every seven minutes) of a quite good 1946 “B” movie from Monogram, Fear. Directed by Alfred Zeisler from a script he wrote with Dennis J. Cooper loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Fear is the tale of Larry Crain (Peter Cookson), a medical student who’s a year shy of graduating when he receives a letter announcing that all scholarships to the college have been terminated, effective immediately. He’s already living in a single room in a house operated by the usual grasping, greedy landlady, Mrs. Williams (Almira Sessions), who’s threatening him with eviction because he’s already six weeks behind on his rent. Like a lot of his fellow students (one of whom is a striking-looking blond played by the young Darren McGavin), he's heard of a professor named Stanley (Francis Pierlot) who runs an unlicensed pawnbroking operation and “lends” students money at exorbitant rates of interest. Larry has already used Stanley’s services before and he goes to him again, this time with a pocket watch that was a gift to Larry’s from his now deceased father. Though dad had paid $150 for the watch, Stanley only offers $10, deducting two dollars from the loan as an advance interest payment. Larry nervously eyes three fireplace pokers in Stanley’s room (for someone who’s hoarded enough money to make loans to students, Stanley’s place doesn’t seem that much nicer than Larry’s, and it’s festooned with the obligatory horrible floral wallpaper that seemed to be de rigueur for “B”-movie sets in this period) and contemplates killing him, but doesn’t … at least, not yet. Later he returns to Stanley’s room and this time he does kill him with one of the pokers, though since two other students who had their own appointment with Stanley show up and Larry flees in panic and doesn’t take the strongbox with the money for which Larry killed Stanley. Instead he hides in a room marked “Wet Paint” and gets some of the stuff on the sleeve of his jacket. In between his non-lethal encounter with Stanley and his lethal one, Larry paid a visit to a local coffee shop and helped out a girl named Eileen (Anne Gwynne) who was 60 cents short on her bill. Later Larry and Eileen go out on a picnic date, only Larry flees in terror when she mentions words beginning with “M,” including “marriage,” and Larry panics when he thinks she’s about to say “murder.”

The Stanley murder is being investigated by Captain Burke (Warren William, on the downgrade but still a highly capable actor who the year before had done another modern-dress adaptation of a classic, as the Claudius equivalent in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Out of the Night a.k.a. Strange Illusion, his rewrite of Hamlet) and his assistant, Detective Shaefer (Nestor Païva from the cast of Creature of the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature). They seem to have anticipated the Columbo strategy of fastening on to a murder suspect early on and essentially irritating him into confessing, though at first they seem to be convinced that the house painter who was working the night of Stanley’s murder was his killer. Larry and Eileen enters a guilt-ridden courtship, and in the middle of all this Larry’s financial problems are suddenly solved when a magazine pays him $1,000 (a pretty hefty sum for an unknown author even now, let alone in 1946!) for an article he wrote about how certain people are such great geniuses that they should be considered above the law and be allowed to commit murder if they need to in order to advance the state of human knowledge. Naturally Captain Burke has read this article and wondered if Larry put his theory into practice by killing Stanley for the $400 tuition he needed to complete his last year of medical school. There’s a marvelous Val Lewton-esque scene in which, after having gone to a sleazy bar called the Sea Hawk and watched a magician doing the saw-a-lady-in-half trick (though Larry is so guilt-ridden he doesn’t stay to see the supposed “victim” emerge just fine at the end), he walks through a darkened city street. He gets handed a pamphlet announcing that the world’s end is closer than he think and then sees a billboard from a religious organization with a similar message. All this happens on the eve of Larry’s latest appointment with Captain Burke, to whom he intends to confess to Stanley’s murder at least in part because the cops browbeat the house painter into a false confession and Larry is too good a soul at heart to want an innocent person to take the fall for his crime.

Then [spoiler alert!] Alfred Zeisler and Dennis J. Cooper pull the hoariest of all cop-outs on us: “It was all a dream!” Larry wakes up in his ratty apartment and Professor Stanley shows up, alive and well, to announce that the school has just created a $1,500 scholarship and it’s been awarded to him. A woman who looks like his dream vision of Eileen just happens to move into the same house as Larry and he chats her up, though when he addresses her as “Eileen” she corrects him and insists her name is Cathy. Despite that horribly tacky ending, Fear is actually a pretty good movie, not a deathless classic on the order of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard or Detour but a well-done film noir on the cheap and a good showcase for Peter Cookson. Like Leo Gorcey, Cookson was a good actor in the James Cagney mold who didn’t get the breaks he should have (his one appearance in a major-studio production was an uncredited minor role in MGM’s Spencer Tracy vehicle A Guy Named Joe) largely because the real Cagney hung on so long he filled the market for that “type.” Cookson’s filmography is almost all “B” movies and the 1950’s graveyard for “B” actors (and “B” talents of all types), guest shots on TV series. It’s a real pity, because Fear illustrates that Cookson had the acting chops for biggers and betters, and indeed when I posted about Ulmer’s Strange Illusion a.k.a. Out of the Night I wished that Cookson had played the male lead instead of Jimmy Lydon, the actor Ulmer got stuck with who portrayed the Hamlet equivalent as all golly-gee-whillikers mannerisms and tics.