La cible idéale

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.

This film is a condemnation of public relations at its worst. As one character says, "taking public opinion is useful; making public opinion is dangerous". This seems to call forth the idea of "engineering consent", an idea that Edward Bernays first published in 1947.

We also have the concepts of "pre-written law" and "fake front groups with high-sounding titles". With that, we see a strong parallel between Communist infiltration and modern-day political movements. And the groups could be left or right-leaning. There is much talk today (2013) of ALEC writing bills and groups like Americans For Prosperity that are little more than a tool of Charles and David Koch.

The film calls out the danger of misleading polls, and the difference between advertising and politics. What was seen as a danger in this film is now standard practice fifty years later. A candidate is "sold" to the American people and polls rarely get to the heart of any matter. Like the discussion in the film about "Jews" and "labor unions", the lobbyists and advertisers know how to target narrow segments of the population...

Jacques Tourneur biographer Chris Fujiwara says Tourneur's later films, including this one, "fall short of the standard of his prior work." He says Tourneur himself "thought the film was a failure". To say this is a challenge. From the point of view of directing and cinematography, this might not reach the level of "Cat People" or "Night of the Demon". But the message is so powerful that the direction almost becomes secondary.

Could this be a forgotten gem in need of a new release?

In the late 1950s, The Fearmakers was a late entry in the Red Scare cycle. By the late 1960s it would have looked like a bizarre and ancient relic. Now in the 21st century, the film looks almost prophetic--if you can overlook the fact that it's basically a pro-nuclear war film. What gives the film resonance for a contemporary audience is its accurate portrayal of 'public relations', polling and advertising, and their ability to sway public opinion. In the 1950s this thesis no doubt took a back seat to the usual Commie-bashing, but now--in the era of push polls, straw polls, and exit polls-- it looks frighteningly accurate. Dana Andrews is excellent as usual. Sadly he is paired up with Marilee Earle as his love interest, and Ms. Earle gives a wooden performance of truly Redwoodian proportions. This was the last film of her brief career.

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 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.