Heisse Spuren

When you watch "Fear No More", I strongly advise you to resist the urge to turn off the movie prematurely. You are bound to think that the movie has a million different plot holes and problems but it is important to realize that eventually they do all fit together and make sense.

When the story begins, a woman is riding on a train and she is attacked by a man with a gun. Before she is knocked unconscious, she notices a dead man in the compartment with her. When she awakens, a man identifying himself as a policeman is interviewing her and acting as if she murdered the woman in the train car. However, soon she manages to escape from him and is soon picked up by a nice man who offers to help.

You need to understand that there is a reason the policeman doesn't seem very competent and the story so hard to believe and if you keep watching there is an excellent payoff. Plus many of the typical cliches you'd expect to see in such a film are often subverted in the name of the plot and characters making sense. For example, in too many movies, a person in trouble meets up with someone while they're on the run and almost instantly the stranger believes them and risks their life to help....but this isn't exactly what happens in "Fear No More"...just watch and you'll see the plot problems and cliches melt away and the story turns out to be a dandy. Well worth your time...just be patient with it!

Mala Powers is sent on a business trip by her employer, John Harding. When she gets to her train compartment, there's a man with a gun, and a dead woman. After she fails to convince him that she is not whoever he is looking for, he knocks her out. A cop wakes her, and prepares to take her to jail. However, Miss Powers escapes and hitches a ride with Jacques Bergerac and his son back to Los Angeles. After Bergerac drops his son off with his ex-wife (with many recriminations), he returns to Miss Powers and tries to find out what's bothering her. She evades his questions, and finds her old boyfriend, whom she was letting stay in her apartment while she was gone, dead.

It's a story that grows more and more dire as secrets are revealed, things she remembers not being where she left them -- including the ex-boyfriend -- until her resolve crumbles and she falls into a paranoid rant.

It's a pretty good movie up until that point, with the audience beginning to question the evidence of their own eyes. One of the IMDb reviewers calls it "Hitchcock on a budget" and that's not a bad description if you ignore the lack of visual flair. The result is an intriguing movie .... at least until the denouement, which is a bit of a disappointment.

Although French ,Jacques Bergerac made only two movies in his native land :"un homme se penche sur son passé" and a small part in "Marie-Antoinette Reine De France "where he is virtually unknown ; is it because of that that his name in the movie is Colbert (like Claudette ,who is famous both in the US and in her native land)?

"Fear no more " is an excellent Hitchcokian thriller , with a solid screenplay,and good acting ,particularly by Mala Powers ,lost in a nightmarish set -up : as soon as they arrive in her boss's house, there's no more letup as the story continues to build in suspense and intensity as the interventions become more and more overwhelming for the heroine -who spent some time in a mental hospital- who thinks she's losing her mind -and her only ally does too;Helena Nash's face recalls several hitchcock's villainesses (" the man who knew too much" 2nd version ,"notorious" )

And the screenwriters had not forgotten Hitchcock's lesson:expect the unexpected ; the sudden new developments are numerous all along the movie ,and the supporting characters are not cardboard ( the child's mother is not so petulant, Seymour is not so strong);but the movie belongs to Mala Powers ,whose facial expressions ran the gamut from pain to terror to rebellion.

Fear No More is a Hitchcock lite low budget noirish conspiracy thriller. It was the only film made by director Bernard Wiesen. The rest of his output was television shows.

Sharon (Mala Powers) is a secretary taken to the train for a business trip to San Francisco by her employer's chauffeur. He puts her on the train and gives her an envelope for an errand.

In the compartment she finds a stranger and a dead woman. She is knocked out and when she regains consciousness. A cop accuses her of murder. Sharon manages to escape from the cop.

She is almost run down by Paul (Jacques Bergerac) a Frenchman taking his son back to his ex wife Denise. Paul gives Sharon a lift to her Los Angeles apartment where she lives with Keith.

Only when she returns to the apartment after going out for a drink with Paul. Keith is dead and the same killer from the train pursues her.

It transpires that Sharon had a mental breakdown. Maybe she is mad or paranoid. Her employer Milo Seymour tells a different story. Sharon was not sent on a business trip and stole $3000 from his safe which is in her envelope.

Not only that, the dead woman from her train compartment walks in. She is alive and well and claims to be Milo's wife.

Despite the low budget, there are a lot of twists as it seems Milo has elaborate plans of his own. The ending does get very hysterical and melodramatic which is a bit of a let down.

Mala Powers mistakenly thinks she can FEAR NO MORE when Good Samaritan Jacques Bergerac finds her lying in the middle of the road after she escapes the policeman who arrested her for the murder of a woman on a train. He takes her to her place where there's another dead body and the couple get an even bigger surprise when they go to her employer's house and find the cop and the "murdered" woman there, insisting she's insane. Jacques doesn't know what to think when he's told Mala is also an escapee from a mental institution after having killed her previous employer. WTF?

Jacques Bergerac, handsome star of stage, screen, and tabloid scandal, was like a suave, Gallic version of Mike Henry whose thick French accent made him hard to understand half the time but it never mattered much since he was usually just eye candy anyway. As luck would have it, Jacques is called upon to react instead of act in this "twisty mystery" that's not half bad if you don't examine it too closely and, in its defense, you don't get the chance. Bottom line: it's a fast-moving B- movie held together by Mala Powers, a pretty good little actress, something I never noticed before.