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...

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.

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.

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.

A terse little thriller which both recalls 'North by Northwest' and 'Psycho' and anticipates 'Marnie' and 'Torn Curtain' shot by the Academy Award-winning cameraman Ernest Haller beginning at Union Station at night and ending in the Hollywood Hills the following morning.

The plot gets so convoluted you half expect it all to turn out to be a dream (or rather a nightmare) but when it finally does reach it's conclusion it does so satisfactorily.