Fear

Made with the most limited means, Alfred Zeisler's 1946 Fear accidentally accomplishes a strangely effective, if monotonous, fusion of form and meaning.  A Poverty Row (Monogram) rip off of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, the film seems an exercise in squalor -- the masochism and self-abasement intrinsic to the Russian novelist's subject matter is here represented by the film's shadowy and desolate camerawork, its threadbare acting, and its dishearteningly shabby sets and mise-en-scene.  In a limited way, Crime and Punishment is a depressing narrative about a nasty, meaningless crime.  (Of course, there's much more to the book, but the writer does, indeed, dwell on poverty and misery).  Fear is shot in a way that manifests this depression -- the poverty of its cinematic means mirrors the poverty of the main character and his destiny.  In a way, the film is so cheap and so barren that it creates an avant-garde effect -- this is the lower depths shot in a way so bleak as to achieve an almost perfect unity of means and ends.  This is not to say that the film is any good.  It's unintentionally nightmarish -- sort of like an Ed Wood picture without the wit and glib self-assurance.  This movie knows that it cost next to nothing and its ashamed of itself.

A medical student has run out of money.  He tries to pawn his father's wristwatch.  In a bizarre plot turn, the man to whom he offers the watch is one of the medical school's professors.  The young man goes to a campus hang-out where he meets a dame.  Then, he returns to the professor's apartment and beats him to death with a poker.  (Several of the other students have suggested that the professor, who is intensely disliked, is not a  human being but just a "black beetle.")  The young man is summoned to the police station but only for the purpose of returning to him his father's watch, found at the murder scene.  The murderer is tailed by a cop and it becomes pretty clear that the inspector suspects him of the killing.  The medical student becomes distraught and confesses the killing to his girlfriend.  It turns out that the murder was meaningless -- the day after the kid kills the professor, he receives a thousand dollars from "a professional periodical" for an article about "the man above the law".  This is the term the film employs for the Nietzschean Ubermensch, an idea that inspired Raskolnikov's crime in the Dostoevsky novel.  The inspector hounds the medical student and he fantasizes a montage involving nooses under a big enigmatic sign that says "Death is Around the Corner".  The murderer stands on a railroad track to allow a train to kill him but a railroad worker pushes him out of the way at the last moment -- this is fortunate because the murky rear-projection locomotive couldn't hurt a fly..  A little later, with the authorities closing in, the medical student darts across a road and is hit by a car.  This jolt wakes up the student and he discovers that it's all been just a bad dream.  

The film's spaces are shapeless -- they look like partitioned spaces in a grim warehouse:  a bar is a counter with some bottles; at the police station, the cops are always working -- this is nightmarish in itself:  at any hour of the day, you can find the inspector smoking a pipe like Sherlock Holmes and trying solve crimes.  When the hero takes his girl on a date, the park is represented by some shabby-looking shrubs and a painted backdrop that is supposed to look like a meadow.  The acting is wooden or feverish.  The medical student, a handsome little fellow with sharp features, is violently brusque, insults everyone, and swings between unmotivated fits of hilarity and, then, grief.  The images are all monochrome, a murky, shabby grey that seems always a bit out of focus -- everything is not exactly dark in the film, just a listless grey as if the characters and sets are enveloped in fog.  The camera sometimes jerkily dollies forward to encounters between characters.  When the hero first visits the professor's house, the camera tracks the man up three flights of stairs, cutting between each landing.  The viewer wonders why we need to be shown the character traversing every single step in the rooming house.  But it turns out, in the murder scene, that there are obstacles to escape on each level and so this preliminary (and unnecessary-seeming tour of the staircases) pays off in suspense immediately after the killing.  Parts of the movie are strangely funny -- we hear a saxophone playing in the night, a typical film noir, convention but here the camera tilts down to show an actual saxophonist practicing in the garret below.  There's some Ed Wood-style haranguing when the hero observes that Thomas Alva Edison believed that the end justified the means and that to achieve the light bulb, the inventor "would gladly have eliminated people who stood in his way."  Street scenes are wrapped in perpetual gloom with a man and woman couple crossing in front of the camera dollying inward to establish notionally that we are outside on the pavement.  There's a  weird proliferation of extras in the penultimate scene in which the hero seems to be hit by a car.  All of sudden, there's about twenty people, possibly friends of the director, standing around as if hypnotized.

Zeisler, the director, is an odd case.  He was born in a German neighborhood in Chicago but returned to Germany during the Weimar period.  He directed the famous 1932 film Viktor oder Viktoria, later remade by Blake Edwards as a Julie Andrews vehicle.  When the Nazis seized power, Zeisler came back to Hollywood where he worked as director on about a dozen films, all of them made on Poverty Row.  Fear isn't very interesting but its only 68 minutes long and, in a certain way, it's sheer cheapness contributes to an eerie dreamlike effect,  The movie accidently achieves atmosphere that it couldn't produce if it tried.  And it also somehow manages to be so inconsequential and dismal that it is instantly forgettable -- you can't recall how the film started or its original premises long before the movie is over.