Fear No More

FEAR NO MORE stars Mala Powers as Sharon Carlin, who finds herself caught up in a terrifying mystery full of murder and possible conspiracy. All this, arising from a simple, relaxing train ride to San Francisco.

When Sharon is joined by a seemingly helpful man named Paul (Jacques Bergerac), her life truly begins to spin out of control!

This is a wonderfully dark suspense thriller! The best of such films reveal the depraved / perverse side of human nature, usually resulting in its undoing. This movie is nearly perfect on that score...

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!

Secretary Sharon Carlin (Mala Powers) heads from Los Angeles to San Francisco via train on a business trip. Things go bad the moment the train leaves the station as she is met in her cabin by a dead woman and a man with a gun, who knocks her unconscious. She is woken up by a cop who tells her the body has been moved and she is being charged with murder. She jumps off the train and soon runs into good Samaritan Paul Colbert (Jacques Bergerac). He initially believes her story, but then begins to have doubts when she reveals she spent time in a mental institution for murder. This 77-minute picture moves at a fast pace and has some nice twists in it. Viewers will actually start to doubt Sharon's story and her paranoia is well established. Not a classic, but worth watching once if just for the scene where Colbert's son cracks his forehead on the dashboard in a near crash.

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.

Sometimes one runs across an Academy Award level performance in a B film and the performance doesn't get the attention it should have. Mala Powers was a remarkably talented actress who rarely got to show off what she was capable of doing, being used largely as decoration in things like fifties horror movies because, alas, she was quite attractive and in those days of Piper Laurie, Lori Nelson, et cetera, young attractive ladies were often cast in slop. But in this highly watchable effort Mala Powers gives what amounts to a complete acting class as she pours her heart into this stunning performance which has to be watched several times to be fully appreciated. Ms. Powers taught the Michael Chekhov school or style of acting professionally for many years but she could certainly show her students this work as evidence that she knew what she was talking about. In this acting theory, the Chekhov-influenced actor attempts to indicate through gestures a reflection of the interior or psychic anguish that is being felt. Movements and gestures must be true and effective and lively but not forced and inappropriate or unnecessarily exaggerated. If you just take isolated scenes and you know the plot, you can watch her emotional display and her gesturing and how organic and integrated they are. There are no false moves, no exaggerated gestures and no grandstanding. Ably supported by Jacques Bergerac as a troubled man who seems to find highly troubled women to court without even trying, Mala Powers keeps us wondering about her sanity until the rather feeble and highly implausible ending moments but it's well worth a watch for people who like to curl up and watch a pretty good mystery thriller with one performance that goes way beyond what one would expect and which shows the post-Slanislavski school (Slanikovsky was Chekhov's teacher) in all its raging glory. It's a must-see for serious acting students. I hope this review does not sound too artsy for the viewer-- it's one of the gutsiest performances in a film that I've seen!