Frayeur

I rated Fear (1946) 5/10. Pretty great B #noir. A lot of good visuals that are reminiscent of German films of the 20s and 30s. It's too bad it is a bit too trite and kind of like a zillion others to be amazing.

Poverty row Monogram Pictures produced Fear based on Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment. We've seen better adaptions.

Medical student Peter Cookson is really up against it financially. Rent is overdue, he owes the college money. He goes to a professor who doubles on the side as a shylock. In a moment of anger he kills the professor.

The plot follows fairly closely the Dostoevsky story, but it has one big cop out of an ending. In addition leading man Peter Cookson gives a rather bland performance.

Police captain Warren William and dpgged detective Nestor Paiva do a lot better.

For a Monogram feature and Sam Katzman this is fine art.

Well, in this one we have actress Beatrice Straight's husband (Peter Cookson) and Chris Pine's mother (Anne Gwynne) along with Warren William starring in Fear from 1946, directed by Alfred Zeisler.

This is an American retelling of Crime & Punishment until the final moments of the film.

Cookson is a broke medical student who kills a professor (Francis Pierlot) who doubles as a pawnbroker. However, he leaves the man's apartment in a panic, without taking any money. His guilt consumes him, and it doesn't help that two police detectives (William and Nestor Paiva) are on his case.

What is interesting about this film is that the director was from the German expressionist school and gives us a wonderful dream sequence involving railroad tracks and makes use of angles and shadows effectively.

As for the end of the film - it's a device used in so many films during that time. It's really a cop out, even if I did get a kick out of it.

The dream (or nightmare) structure was a staple of the noir cycle; The Woman in the Window, Fear in the Night, and its remake Nightmare were some of the films that employed this device. Far from a cop-out, it was a way of packaging a rather subtle psychological insight: that our dreams expressed our conflicts between our superegos and our ids. (In a later film with noirish roots, Brian De Palma's Body Double, the "story" of the movie similarly sketched the protagonist's worst self-estimation, triggered by a claustrophobic episode.)

In Fear, a medical student (Peter Cookson) is on the brink of abandoning school because his money has run out; in frustration, he murders a professor who moonlights as a pawnbroker. Questioned by the police, he ill-advisedly spouts warmed-over Nietzsche like the effete killers in Hitchcock's Rope. Then, out of the blue, a scholarly periodical to which he submitted an article sends him a check for $1000 (!) -- the most implausible occurrence in the entire noir cyle. He grows more reckless, and suspicion continues to grow....

Fear was a low-budget Monogram programmer (clocking in at just over an hour) but looks a lot better, angled and shadowed like more lavish productions. It won't satisfy the literal-minded, but it's a decent enough way to while away a dark hour.

Peter Cookson is a medical student who receives the bad news that the medical college he is attending is no longer able to afford to grant scholarships. His future becomes suddenly darker as he's faced with having to drop out with only one year to go. How this bad news affects his psyche is more or less what the film is about in a post-war 1940's era take on psychology and dreams. It seems to revolve around a sense of alienation portrayed through a surprisingly riveting dream sequence that occurs on a dark night on the railroad tracks. In spite of its meager budget this movie succeeds in rating fairly high up on the standards of my film scale.