The Fearmakers

This low-budget 50's thriller has a treatment standard for its time, but the premise is fascinating. Dana Andrews plays Alan Eaton, a veteran of the Korean War who comes home (after years of being brainwashed as a POW.) When he returns to his Public Relations firm in Washington, DC, he is surprised to find it has been sold by his former partner, who later died; his own name has been retained only for the goodwill value he had generated. Soon after, he comes to suspect that the firm no longer uses polls and surveys to shape its PR campaigns, it conducts its surveys in accordance with a hidden agenda and shapes the data to meet its own demands. By the end of the film, the entire conspiracy (and its plot to get a man elected Governor) is exposed. Americans are free to believe everything they read, once again.

Everything about the movie is just what one would expect from an inexpensive thriller from the era, and that's not bad at all. Probably the most appealing character is played by Mel Torme (Andrews is much too surly - and for good reason - to capture audience sympathy), a number-cruncher who remains oblivious to the moral implications of the data he is massaging for his employers. His best moment comes when he picks EXACTLY the wrong moment to strike up a conversation with Marilee Earle; the audience knows she can't possibly tear her attention away from a task she has been sent to perform, but we all know how it feels to want to break through another person's preoccupation.

Thematically, the film bites off more than it is prepared to chew. The premise (that some distinct group may control a substantial part of the information we Americans receive every day) is both disturbing and plausible. We do our best to make sure that no single source can exert too much power over information, but we can never be sure just how much of the data we believe to be factual, is actually cooked up by people with an agenda. Exposing one conspiracy (as seen in The Fearmakers) does not stamp out all such conspiracies at once, and the film offers no hint of assurance that the public will be any wiser, the next time information is manipulated. One may extrapolate that there is a terrible danger in trusting ANY source of information, but no solution is suggested.

A minor disappointment comes from another important topic that is introduced at the beginning and then thrown away: Eaton's brainwashing. He has apparently been subjected to gruelling torture and mind control in the recent past, but it has no effect at all on his behavior except to make him grumpy and subject to sudden headaches. Basically, this is used as a plot device which allows the bad guys to get the upper hand at times, but nothing in the story really turns on it. Perhaps after seeing The Manchurian Candidate, one's expectations are set too high; certainly one can't fault the scriptwriters, as the novel had not yet been published.

The most unfortunate aspect of the movie is that a 1950's happy ending is predetermined. By the 1970's, filmmakers would be comfortable creating conspiracy stories with darker endings, and today it is difficult for viewers to accept a movie in which a problem like this one is completely solved. By current standards, the last few minutes of The Fearmakers are dreamlike and childish...and perhaps this explains some of the film's charm. I'd love to see a remake of the movie, set once again in the 50's, nearly identical right up to the end, and then have Alan Eaton wake up to discover that the conspiracy has NOT been neatly wrapped up at all. It's enjoyable to imagine a finale in which he runs, Kevin McCarthy-like through Washington DC, grabbing away people's newspapers and shouting "Where do they get their facts? Where do they get their numbers?" Who knows? Seems like they're making a lot of remakes these days, and this one would be do-able with a small budget...

Despite the fact that it's a B movie,"The Fearmakers" from 1958 is absolutely fascinating to watch today. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, it stars Dana Andrews, Dick Foran, more well-known for westerns, and -- get ready - Mel Torme! And he was good! Andrews plays Alan Eaton, a public relations firm co-owner who fought in Korea and spent time in the enemy camp being tortured. Now back home, he suffers from headaches and blackouts occasionally. When he arrives at his old company, he finds out that his partner died and that the power of attorney he gave his partner was used to sell the business out from under him to Jim McGinnis (Dick Foran). McGinnis offers Alan a consultant job, and he is encouraged to take it by a Senator friend, who suspects shady business in the firm and wants Alan to check it out.

Here's the shady business. The firm is suspected of using skewed polling data to make certain politicians look good. Alan has plenty to say about the way questions are asked in polls, and to whom, and he also has some things to say about lobbyists. Anyway, he needs to get his hands on the cards that apparently list the people polled or how they were chosen. He's also suspicious of his partner's "accident" and wants to gather information about that.

Of course, today we call these shady people campaign managers, marketing people, Karl Rove -- I sat through the conversation about special interests and polling and thought I had entered the Twilight zone. I had -- it was 1958, and this guy had ethics that don't exist today since the types of things being referred to are acceptable.

This film seems short for the material, and there are too many coincidences in the script to make it not totally believable. Andrews does a good job, but by this point had hit the skids - gone were the big 20th Century Fox films, possibly due to his alcoholism. Though he continued to act, he became a very wealthy real estate man and began speaking for the National Alcoholism Council in the '70s. He also served as President of the Screen Actors Guild. Dick Foran is appropriately slimy, and Mel Torme is excellent as an assistant who knows too much.

Very interesting movie to view given today's political workings.

Not enough can be said about the de-evolution of the packaging of our politicians and expectations of our news media.

The societal rumblings of big brother control and the awareness of the effect and success of Edward Bernays book of blueprints to "guide" the people...Propaganda (1928)...began to surface in the 1950's and then sank as fast as Jimmy Carter's presidency.

This post Mccarthy era movie is gallantry trying to stay on that noble course, but the subject matter is too complex for this type of production to do anything but reduce the rhetoric to a great effort of B-Movie making.

There is so much here just waiting to be exorcised and exposed, and it is exasperating today to understand that this is an embryonic idea that was born of an ideal and died of an apathetic populace that got the government and the media they deserve.

You will find few films filled with as much fulfilled prophecy as this.

The real irony, when viewing this film, is the way it views those who lobby for special interests in Washington (and the "marketing" of candidates, skewing polling data to achieve the desired results whether the sampling or data is fair or not) has become the norm in our own era. Hence, the villain in this film is pretty much doing the same sort of thing a Karl Rove does now, but we've just changed our perspective on it. The film purports a high tone of moral outrage at political practices which completely dominate our own time.

That to me is the most fascinating thing about this film (which is well-made in a clearly B-picture sort of way: not too many sets, a conspicuously minor set of actors except for Dana Andrews--though I agree with others posting here that Mel Torme's performance is a standout--and a certain unadventurousness in the visuals and pacing, despite Tourneur's presence at the helm). By watching the film, we are made aware just how much we've come to accept certain the vast "untruthfulness" or immorality of the way politicians are marketed and elected. It's as though all of the things deplored in this film have completely become "business as usual" in our time, seemingly because the desire to operate this way in politics has survived tenaciously despite the occasional railing against it the way this film does. These days you might hear objections from alternate news sources or fringe publications to this type of deceptive political lobbying and marketing, but other than that it's clearly our daily contemporary political reality being objected to so strenuously 45 years ago in THE FEARMAKERS. While the film unfolds tightly and economically enough, it does suffer from a certain "pat-ness" concerning the plot coincidences concerning the doctor character Andrews meets on the plane at the beginning of the film. That whole subplot unfolds too easily within the overall story, as though the already claustrophobically tiny world of the characters of this movie couldn't possibly expand enough for some randomness or ambiguity between it's small ensemble of characters. Is there no-one in Washington who isn't in some way related to this plot? If memory serves, I don't believe there is ever a line spoken by anyone in this film who is not in some way part of the web of characters involved somehow for or against the unfolding scam, even though we are in cabs, in hotels, in a boarding house, on a plane, and in the city of Washington, throughout.

Still, it's worth the time invested, and presents a curiously brusque performance by Andrews. His character is supposed to be tired and unstable after his ordeal in Korea, and yet it's difficult to know whether the occasionally zombie-like performance of Andrews in this film is entirely intentional. The actor himself seems fatigued and lethargic at times-- is that all for the sake of the character? But there are enough little twists and surprises in this film to hold our interest, and if the film feels at time like an extended episode of the old Perry Mason TV series, that's not necessarily a bad thing if you like that sort of presentation (as I admittedly do).

I'd also agree with others here that this is a film ripe for a remake, although there is no doubt it would be a COMPLETELY different movie, with a completely different moral sense.

The Fearmakers (1958)

"The Fearmakers" has the makings of a classic but also the meat of an "important" movie in its themes, which are complex. As a kind of background is the fact that returning Korean War POW Dana Andrews had been brainwashed and abused by his captors and so had an unstable mind. This theme is handled in a whole slew of movies, including a finely tuned Richard Widmark film "Time Limit" (directed by Karl Malden of all people, in 1957) and of course the now legendary "Manchurian Candidate" (starring Frank Sinatra in 1962). And in this film we have the semi-auteur director Jacques Tourneur pulling it together.

But this is just the start. The larger plot has to do with the burgeoning lobbyist scene in Washington D.C. in the 1950s, and with the growing polling and public relations field with all the implications of social brainwashing. There are insertions of anti-nuclear pacifism and the connection of smoking and "malignancies." And above all there is a naive population implied at every turn. It's as if the movie is a wake up call to the audience, that your elected officials in Washington can't be blindly trusted, that pollsters are not always honest, that the world is an insidious and nasty place even though the Eisenhower 1950s might have you think otherwise.

This is a nice updating of the film noir type, a decade after the classic genre's real peak. Here the returning G.I. has to go alone against a society very different than those in noirs of 1948, and the soldier's Korean War experience was very different from the usual WWII backdrop of earlier films. He turns to a woman for help, and to a reporter, so at least those are clichés we don't mind revisiting, but there is no murder afoot, no detective gumshoeing around, and very little dark and brooding photography.

Why has this fallen so far under the radar? It not only gets a low composite rating on this site, but doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry. My guess is that the movie talks too much. The character Andrews plays is having to explain things in words, either persuading someone to help him or accusing someone he thinks is up to no good. For me this wasn't such a big deal. I didn't expect an action film, and I didn't even expect a riveting film noir. With Tourneur in charge, I just expected something interesting, and it is very very interesting. I think anyone trying to grasp the Korean War experience, or anyone who wants to understand (and not just love) film noir as a "cycle" of films, has to give this a shot.

And Dana Andrews is his usual first rate restrained lovable self, with a decent supporting cast and some very good writing to back him up. The photographer is Sam Leavitt, who did a number classic, visually arresting films from this period: "Man with the Golden Arm," "Defiant Ones," "Cape Fear," "Anatomy of a Murder," etc. You get the idea. And Tourneur might be turning to small production companies for work (this was a one-movie company called Pacemaker), but that doesn't mean the film looks or feels shoddy. Not a bit. It's just the state of the industry in the late 1950s, a low point in many ways. And here's one that slipped through the net.