Fear (Monogram, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a couple of movies on TCM in quick succession that seemed to make a good pairing even though they were made 30 years apart and under quite different auspices. One was a 1946 Monogram production called Fear which I’d encountered many years ago but hadn’t seen in quite a while. It was an uncredited modern-dress adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment directed and co-written (with Dennis Cooper) by Alfred Zeisler. TCM host Eddie Muller mentioned some of Zeisler’s unusual background: though he was born in Chicago his parents moved to their ancestral homeland, Germany, when he was a boy and he got involved in the German film industry as an actor, writer, director and producer. Probably his most famous German credit was for producing the 1933 film Viktor und Viktoria, about a female German cabaret performer who disguises herself as a man to participate in a drag show -- a bit of gender-bending significantly ill-timed since it came out just as the Nazis were taking power in Germany; and a title and premise that will be familiar to you because of Blake Edwards’ sensationally successful 1982 remake Victor/Victoria. (There was also a quite engaging British version in 1935 called First a Girl, with Jessie Matthews in the lead and her real-life husband, Sonnie Hale, in the role Robert Preston played in the 1982 version.) Forced to flee Germany when the Nazis took over, Zeisler went first to Britain and then the U.S., but for the most part he could only get work as an actor playing stereotypical German villains until Monogram Pictures gave him a chance as a director with this film.

Muller’s introduction made it sound as if it was unusual for a “B” producer to rip off a literary classic from the public domain and turn it into a modern-dress film noir, but in 1945 -- a year before Fear -- PRC had done the same thing to Hamlet with a quite good movie directed by Edgar G. Ulmer alternately released as Out of the Night and Strange Illusion (a film I’ve listed as one of the five best in PRC’s history, with two other Ulmer films -- Bluebeard and Detour -- along with Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House and Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp -- all, intriguingly, by foreign-born directors). Fear even has one actor in common with Ulmer’s Hamlet rework -- Warren William, the villain (the Claudius equivalent) in the Ulmer film and the police inspector who doggedly pursues this film’s protagonist, Lawrence “Larry” Crain (Peter Cookson), for the murder of Stanley (Francis Pierlot). In this version Larry is a student in medical school who’s one year away from graduation when the school suddenly sends out a letter rescinding all scholarships -- including the one Larry was counting on to be able to finish. Stanley isn’t a pawnbroker per se but a professor at the university who functions as an unlicensed pawnbroker and takes advantage of students in financial trouble. Larry uses him to pawn a watch his father gave him on his 15th birthday but only gets $8 for it. He goes to the local coffee shop and buys a bowl of soup for his own dinner. He also helps out another customer, Eileen (Anne Gwynne, best known as one of Universal’s go-to actresses for young damsels in distress in horror films), who can’t pay her 60-cent check. (Inflation -- isn’t it a bitch?)

The coffee shop also features a pool table which some of Larry’s better-heeled students are using (including a quite striking-looking tall blond) and bitching about their own financial transactions with Professor Stanley, whom they describe as a mean-spirited little miser who keeps his money in a strong box in plain view as he makes his exploitative deals with the students. Beset by financial troubles -- with no way to pay the $400 tuition bill for his next year and the typical obnoxious landlady (Almira Sessions) hounding him for back rent -- Larry returns to Stevens’ home (out of which he conducts his second business) with a glass ashtray he pretends is a silver cigarette case that he offers Stevens to pawn -- only, once Stevens’ back is turned, Larry grabs a poker from Stevens’ fireplace and clubs him to death with it. Alas, there are potential witnesses -- a painter who was working on the apartment just below Stevens’ and two of Larry’s fellow student (including that hot-looking blond I definitely wanted to see more of) -- as well as nagging cops Captain Burke (Warren William) and his sidekick Detective Schaefer (Nestor Paiva, of all people -- when I think of him I think of the boat captain in Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequel, Revenge of the Creature), who as I noted in my blog post on the most famous come scritto film of Crime and Punishment, the 1935 Columbia version directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Peter Lorre as the killer and Edward Arnold as the cop come off as sort of prototypes of Columbo, intent on nailing the killer basically by annoying him into confessing.

There are shards of the original social comment in Dostoyevsky’s novel as Larry turns out to have written several articles and submitted them for publication -- including one called “Man Above the Law” which makes the Nietzschean argument that certain individuals are so exceptional and have such potential to make contributions to humanity that they ought to be let alone to do whatever they want and not be subject to such petty inconveniences as the law against murder. Alas, Larry is far more guilt-ridden than the protagonist of his article (which he receives $1,000 for the day after he kills Stevens as well as a renewal of his scholarship -- ah, the irony!), and in the film’s most fascinating scene he takes a walk through deserted city streets at night and sees a montage including the word “DEATH” on a poster, a noose and other reminders of mortality until he’s determined to walk in front of an oncoming train and atone for his crime by committing suicide -- only a railway worker stops him and pulls him back in time. I suspect Zeisler had seen Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim and copied Jean Brooks’ doom-laden walk through the city streets -- just as I suspect from one setup of Cookson staring straight at a mirror and some of Cookson’s querulous intonations that both director and star had seen Sternberg’s 1935 version of the same story.

Compared to Peter Lorre, Cookson is hardly as good as a stylized figure of menace but he’s more chilling in some ways precisely because he’s so ordinary: one thinks, “If a nice, normal kid like this can be driven to murder someone, any of us can.” Larry is so normal he even dates Eileen, taking her to the park for picnics and seeming interested in her long-term, though at the same time he’s too guilt-ridden to commit and he’s about to be arrested for the crime by Burke, who’s waiting in his apartment -- when all of a sudden Larry comes to and Zeisler and his co-writer pull the all too familiar old gag on us: “It was all a dream!” Given that even mega-talents like director Fritz Lang and writer Nunnally Johnson had used an it-was-all-a-dream ending on a major noir the year before, The Woman in the Window, fellow German expat Zeisler might have felt justified in doing it here. In his waking life Larry gets his scholarship renewed, Stanley turns out to be not only alive but a kind and generous benefactor instead of a nasty S.O.B., and even “Eileen” turns up -- though she insists that her real name is Cathy. Despite the ending, Fear is a work of real power, a master class (alongside the work of Lewton at RKO and Ulmer at PRC) of how you could make a quality movie on a low budget, and surprisingly well acted by Cookson, who got tired of all the boy-next-door roles he was getting and went to Broadway to play the lead in the play The Heiress alongside Beatrice Straight (playing the roles Montgomery Clift and Olivia de Havilland did in the 1949 film), whom he married and stayed with until his death in 1990. Apparently the two were among the founders of the Actors’ Studio -- something you wouldn’t necessarily guess from the good but straightforward performance Cookson gives here, without a trace of the Method affectations all too many American actors learned at the Studio and slavishly copied.