Fragment of Fear

It's a shame that while Fragment seems to be a latent classic, what frustrates is Hemmings' rather offbeat performance early on, rather at odds with the style and ambiance of the film. Also, the plot seems to be missing elements which were either cut, not filmed or deliberately left out to add to the jumbled nature of Tim's disintegration. What is left is a paradigm of paranoid perfection with Tim's existential fate rendered powerless in the face of the crises his alternate path's absence creates. His brain develops as many holes as he may have put in his arms, and he eventually disappears down a rabbit hole part Hitchcock, part Kubrick, part Antonioni. The supporting cast are all exceptional with such household faces as Daniel Massey, Kenneth Cranham, Arthur Lowe and Philip Stone. Director Safarian was subsequently to make his best film Vanishing Point, placing Fragment as the nearly man in the careers of practically everyone involved. If you enjoy your movies off centre and with a focus on style over substance, without paying consideration to tedious concerns like comprehensibility then you will find much to like here.

I thought that this was a brilliant thriller. Hemmings's character is the perfect foil, an admitted addict. He is like a mute who cannot scream at the horror enveloping him. Paranoia and fecklessness bounce off a genuine conspiracy. The tension is almost unbearable.

I felt this could have been so much better and began to temporarily tire of it somewhere around the halfway mark and then it lifted and ran pretty well to the end. David Hemmings seemed a bit limp and Gayle Hunnicutt almost asleep but then maybe it was the erratic script. I guess there is also the problem where a film is going to have different levels of reality that not all can be made too transparently clear. There is a wonderful cameo from Wilfred Hyde-White and things certainly pick up with the appearance of Daniel Massey and Arthur Lowe. Apart from the dialogue being rather lacklustre at times and some scenes going on a tad too long, the music is completely wrong. I have seen the score by Johnny Harris highly praised and possibly outside of the film the jazzy music is fine but here it is too loud, too obvious and basically, bloody annoying. Despite all this, the film remains likable enough and certainly worth a look.

How much you like Fragment of Fear depends on how much you've seen of the type of film it is. David Hemmings believes some sort of peculiar conspiracy behind the murder of his rich aunt and he goes about his way to prove it back in London, except he gets his apartment broken into, strange messages and cackling laughter mysteriously appear on his tape recorder, and someone appears to have sent him a warning letter written on his own paper with his own typewriter. There's a girl on the side which he wants to marry and he's had a drug problem a few years back so that no one around him believes his ravings about a secret society out to silence him because he used to be a dope fiend. We even get the "we have no such person working here" mystery man cliché and if you're reading this, chances are you've seen variations of all this in one form or another.

So form is where the movie must distinguish itself except its ambitions never rise to the occasion. Great movies in this "losing a grip on reality" mystery/thriller niche were made at around the same time and Fragment of Fear can't measure up to them because a lot of what is ambiguous here is mostly a series of plot points and there's very little of a metaphorical/poetic nature, a key by which to render Hemmings' struggle a metaphor for something else. It can't measure up to something like Roeg's Don't Look Now or Weir's The Last Wave because this is still mostly a thriller, with all the noise and alarm and the sound and fury of a hunt, this not dying away in the distance to reveal something potentially meaningful about the condition of a fragile man trying to hold onto his pieces as his world bears him false witness, not until the end at least when the movie retreats with a maddened Hemmings inside his head for a final showpiece where "creepy old peoples' faces" stare ominously in the wide-angle lens of the camera and the the movie disappears on board a train through a dark tunnel and emerges on the other side on a grey lonely beachwalk where psychodrama and "twisty" horror thriller are allowed to finally converge.

This is not a bad movie by any means but something in it tells me Richard Sarafian may not have been the best man for the job. He turns in something that is competent and borderline successful but it lacks the intuitive mark of a director who's making his kind of film. The problem here is that the movie posits itself as something ambiguous except it's mostly literal and straightforward. When David Hemmings goes mad we know it not a second too late. Sarafian probably felt more comfortable in the grit and dust of Vanishing Point and Man in the Wilderness, films which are at once more metaphoric in their conception and poetic in execution, but it's still a bit puzzling that he didn't make something more out of Fragment of Fear.

An intriguing thriller with a fine, bewildered performance from David Hemmings. Unfortunately, the film overdoses visually in bizarre for bizzare's sake with a very unsatisfactory ending.