Fear (1946)

Fear (1946) is a classic low budget Crime and Punishment derived film noir tale of murder, urban isolation, poverty, morality, and an object lesson in the nascent and embryonic video-visual techniques employed in the name of production in the 1940s, in a time even before television.

This Monogram Pictures production of  Crime and Punishment is an example of what cinema can do to a text and will do to a text, because it is barely Dostoyevsky, and yet leans into that tale not just for narrative and dramatic features, but to try and pull some of the existential magic over form the olden Russian experiences of the day to day realisations of pre-modern life in 1866. Everything stated was to come.

The crime element in this long story is confined to one central focused node of narrative matter, like an atomic nucleus. Larry has convinced himself that the professor, who in Fear (1946) stands in for the elderly lady of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky's literary awakening, has exploited him, and he kills the professor.

Panicking as he hears someone coming, Larry leaves the money behind thus absorbing the murder into the moral and metaphysical, and he also leaves some clues, inspiring paranoia as best a noir tale of moral anguish and dilemma must do.

The premise of an article that Larry publishes is that certain exceptional people are above the law, not an unfamiliar theme from the ages, of course evoking The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg, who has never had any film noir made of his books.

A pity that, for The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner would make a decent noir in any era, and while not classically gothic, invites an open path out of the romantic-gothic splendour of undiscovered and decaying European history, directly into high modern fascism with its familiar stops in as we have seen, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche.

As it often makes me wonder, why is there no noir of Hogg? Memoirs of a Sinner (Polish: Osobisty pamiętnik grzesznika przez niego samego spisany) is a 1986 Polish film directed by Wojciech Has, starring Piotr Bajor. 

The film is an adaptation of James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and one of the few, and tells the tale of the protagonist Robert and his doppelganger.

In Memoirs of a Sinner (1986) Robert (Piotr Bajor) is exhumed from the grave by a gang of grave robbers and is forced to recount his life story - a struggle between good and evil, embodied in his doppelganger whom he eventually kills.

Returning to Fear (1946) the finished item is more low budget noir with a hint of the master-racial philosophy as a narrative question mark, and an amoral justification for action fairly topical for sure to 1946.

The dream sequence, often a vehicle for existential dread and fractured identities, was a quintessential motif within the noir tradition. Far from being a mere narrative sleight-of-hand, films like The Woman in the Window, and of course Fear do employ the dream structure and the dream elements of montage and non-sequitur and surreal picture making to reveal deep-seated psychological tensions. 

This type of noir, particular to the 1940s more than any other decade, illuminates the chasm between the superego's moral rigidity as perhaps expressed in narrative norms and the id's shadowy desires, suggesting that our nocturnal visions, like the pictures on the big screen in front of you, filtered through cigarette smoke, are not just flights of curiosity and directorial fantasies but coded messages from our fractured psyches. 

In and after this wise the narrative operates as a nightmarish reflection of the protagonist’s darkest insecurities, born from the claustrophobic confines of their own mind.

In Fear, we view Peter Cookson who plays Larry Crain, a disillusioned medical student teetering on the brink of collapse, driven to murder in a fit of financial desperation. His victim—a professor moonlighting as a pawnbroker—falls to a crime steeped in philosophical pretensions. 

Cookson’s character, in a basic and broken down echo of Nietzschean bravado reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Rope, smugly tangles with the police, unaware that his intellectual posturing only deepens their suspicion. 

Yet in true epic dark and radical noir fashion, the absurd intervenes: a scholarly journal, in a deus ex machina of implausibility, rewards him with an improbable windfall of $1,000. Instead of salvation, this stroke of luck merely emboldens his recklessness, hastening his inevitable unravelling.

Despite its low-budget roots, Fear is a compelling slice of noir undermined only by the Hollywood-mandated conclusion imposed by the Production Code. Up until its compromised resolution, the film offers a brooding exploration of guilt's corrosive effects. 

Larry is a film noir male, neither a villain nor a hero, in a world where fate is the villain and there are no heroes, played as a promising medical student whose future is slipping through his fingers, finds himself at the mercy of crushing poverty. 

On the verge of eviction from his squalid apartment and unable to afford his final year of school, he turns to a desperate solution: murdering his pawn-brokering professor for the hidden cash he believes will save him. But fate, ever cruel in the noir universe, has other plans. Just a day too late, Larry receives a check from a publisher for an article he submitted—enough to cover his tuition and stave off ruin. This brutal twist of timing leaves Larry haunted, his psyche unravelling as the police close in.

Larry is yet noir, a character teetering between ambition and despair. Though largely unknown, Cookson exudes the nervous energy of a conflicted soul, his brooding presence tinged with a hint of Tony Perkins’ sinister charm.

Meanwhile, Anne Gwynne’s super-attractive and kind femininity only heightens Larry’s torment, embodying the unattainable stability he craves. And then viewWarren William, who lends his commanding authority to the role of the dogged detective, a far cry from the ruthless pre-Code tycoons he portrayed in films like Employee’s Entrance (1933).

The noir thriller Fear plays like a modern poppy riff on the deeper orchestral moral quandaries of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and to a degree reminds of the suspense of Fritz Lang’s M, but does provide a clever twist as well, able to upend expectations. Peter Cookson stars as Larry Crain, a struggling medical student teetering on the brink of destitution. 

Facing eviction from his rundown boarding house and the looming loss of his medical career due to unpaid tuition, Larry’s desperation pushes him into a fateful confrontation with Professor Stanley, a merciless figure who doubles as the campus loan shark.

Professor Stanley (played with vaudevillian hard-struck venom by Francis Pierlot) is a man of ruthless demands, requiring an absurd interest rate from the students he preys upon. When Larry learns from his classmates that the professor hoards his cash in his own apartment rather than a bank, a dark idea takes root. 

Larry plans to murder Stanley and seize the money for himself. The act is sudden and brutal—Larry lures Stanley with a pawned ashtray, then strikes him down with a fireplace poker. But in the chaotic aftermath, the situation spirals out of control. As Larry fumbles to break into the professor’s secure safe, he’s interrupted by a series of unwelcome visitors—fellow students looking to borrow money, unaware of the crime that has just unfolded.

What should have been Larry’s windfall becomes a nightmare. In his panicked escape, he leaves the money untouched, only to receive a check for $1,000 the next day for an article he had submitted to a magazine. The cruel irony haunts him—if he had waited just one more day, he wouldn’t have needed to kill at all. 

But the murder has already set dark forces in motion. Detective Shaffer (Nestor Paiva) begins shadowing Larry’s every move, while Captain Burke (a commanding Warren William) zeroes in on him as a prime suspect. As Larry’s paranoia mounts, his mental state deteriorates, consumed by the gnawing guilt and the fear that his fate is sealed.

Just as Larry seems certain to face the electric chair, the narrative takes a shocking turn. In a move that disorients both Larry and the audience, a seemingly irrelevant character—a house painter played by Ernie Adams—comes forward to confess to the murder. Despite the absurdity of the confession, the police accept it at face value. Larry, visibly unravelling, is set free, deemed an innocent but mentally unstable man.

Monogram’s Fear is a super stripped-down, 68-minute distillation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, reimagined as a briskly-paced film noir. In this version, the tormented Raskolnikov is transposed into Larry Crain (Peter Cookson), a desperate medical student who, true to the source material, succumbs to murder in his pursuit of survival. 

The classic pawnbroker victim is now a conniving professor who preys on students, while the police are represented by the good cop/bad cop duo of Warren William and Nestor Paiva. Larry’s moral decay is complicated by his romance with the virtuous but struggling Eileen Stevens, portrayed by Anne Gwynne, whose presence adds both tension and pathos.

Cookson’s performance as Crain is intriguing in its flatness—he’s detached and almost spectral, much like Hurd Hatfield in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). It’s a risky choice, but one that serves the character’s inner emptiness. Crain’s emotions remain largely beneath the surface, yet his turmoil is palpable, making him a strangely compelling figure even as he sinks deeper into his psychological abyss.

The film’s shadowy cinematography and atmospheric lighting compensate for its budgetary limitations, infusing each scene with a sense of doom that keeps the tension humming along. For a production emerging from poverty row, Fear manages to be visually arresting, blending stark contrasts and clever angles to evoke a world that’s morally and literally dark.

This twist defies the moral logic of the genre and leaves a lingering unease. Larry may have escaped legal retribution, but the psychological torment remains. The film’s abrupt shift forces the viewer to reassess every character, as the bleak world it inhabits continues to operate under its own twisted rules. Fear may be a modest production, but its clever subversion of noir tropes and unexpected ending make it a standout, delivering a darkly ironic commentary on fate, guilt, and the capricious nature of justice.

Fear is dotted with unsettling imagery that lingers long after the credits roll. The relentless train, symbolizing an inescapable doom; the eerie magic act, beheading without the reassurance of recovery; the ominous black cat, an omen that seems to watch Larry’s every move—these atmospheric details evoke a world where dread permeates every corner, and anything can happen. It’s a shame that the film’s dark momentum is derailed by a tacked-on ending, softening what should have been a relentless descent into moral ruin.

In the end, Fear may be an atmospheric cheapie, but its imaginative direction and haunting set-pieces elevate it beyond mere programmer status. If only the narrative had been allowed to follow its bleak trajectory to the end, it might stand as a minor classic of the genre. My advice: when Larry steps into the street in the film’s final moments, do yourself a favor and reach for the off-button. What precedes that moment is a taut and evocative exercise in noir tension—one that deserves to be remembered on its own merits.

Despite its modest Monogram budget and brisk runtime (barely exceeding an hour), Fear transcends its limitations through artful chiaroscuro and angled compositions that echo the visual splendor of more prestigious studio fare, the great and un self-conscious film noir of the high period of the style. 

Though it may confuse and confound and profoundly bore those seeking narrative realism, for those attuned to the elliptical logic of noir, it offers a satisfyingly shadowed journey into the human abyss—just the sort of film to accompany an hour steeped in darkness and uncertainty.

Despite its low budget, uneven performances, and a narrative riddled with holes, the film still manages to be inventive, atmospheric, and oddly compelling. By taking the familiar story of a man who murders for money and watching his life spiral out of control, Fear adds layers of surreal developments that alternate between surprising, inexplicable, and downright absurd. The final plot twist is so audacious that it makes you question whether the whole thing was intended as a dark, tongue-in-cheek joke.

Peter Cookson plays Larry Crain, a struggling medical student who, like Raskolnikov before him, finds himself at the end of his rope financially. Desperate, he murders his pawnbroker-turned-professor, but this act of violence unravels him, especially when a careless mistake—a watch engraved with his name—links him to the crime. Warren William’s Captain Burke, suavely miscast in what feels like a Lone Wolf picture, toys with Larry as they engage in a tense cat-and-mouse game. Larry’s paranoia and guilt grow, leading to a strikingly expressionistic sequence where he’s haunted by visions of death, wandering through the city in a delirious state. A near-miss with a speeding train jolts him into confessing his crime to Eileen (Anne Gwynne), the film’s token love interest who bafflingly chooses to stand by him.

Just when Larry seems poised to face the consequences, the narrative takes a sharp left turn. In a twist both absurd and anticlimactic, the police inform him that a painter from his building has confessed to the murder. Captain Burke clearly doesn’t buy it, but Larry, seizing this unexpected reprieve, decides to keep silent and embrace his chance at freedom. Yet in classic noir fashion, fate strikes back—Larry is hit by a car and killed as he rushes to reunite with Eileen.

Or so it seems. In a move that evokes both eye-rolls and chuckles, the film swerves into a dream sequence. Larry’s death was only a figment of his overwrought imagination, and he wakes up in bed, safe and sound. Even more baffling, Professor Stanley appears at his door not to accuse him, but to offer him a loan—apparently all is forgiven, if not forgotten. The world is righted, and Larry stumbles into a sunny hallway where he encounters a familiar face: Eileen, though this time she’s Kathy, and they’re meeting for the first time. In a creepy echo of Vertigo, Larry asks if he can call her Eileen. Unfazed, she shrugs it off, and the two make plans, with Larry casually promising to explain it all someday as the screen fades to black.

The ending is a head-scratcher, frustrating in its refusal to commit to the film’s earlier bleakness. Why tack on this saccharine coda to a narrative already rich with noir fatalism? Perhaps it was an attempt to pad out the runtime, or to give the audience a surprise twist akin to Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window, which similarly ends with a dreamy reset. Director Alfred Zeisler’s German film roots and clear admiration for Lang are on display, with nods like the white paint smudge on Larry’s jacket subtly echoing Lang’s influence. The sudden pivot to a dream conclusion, while puzzling now, might have resonated with 1946 audiences more attuned to psychoanalysis and the mysteries of the mind.

Fear is a film that lives up to its title in ways that are both intentional and unintentional. Its plot holes, bizarre twists, and narrative absurdities are all easily forgiven if you view the film through the logic of a dream, where nothing quite adds up and reality is always slipping away. 

Zeisler’s inventive direction and the film’s eccentricities may leave viewers bemused, but also oddly satisfied. After all, dreams, and noir, do not always have to make sense. The dream! Only occasionally and only in film noir, what is usually employed as a cliché is in Fear a style and technique which reinforces the noir aspect by the very virtue of its oneirics.

Fear 1946

Directed by Alfred Zeisler

Release Date:2 March 1946 | Production Date: mid Jul--late Jul 1945 | Copyright Number: Monogram Pictures Corp.5 January 1946LP21 | Duration (in mins): 68 | PCA No:11171