Fear eats the soul A fragile, big-eyed young man wakes up in a cheap hotel room. He had just been in a very different room, which seemed endless because of the mirror doors. A young woman screamed utterly. He killed a man and hid the body in a closet. How good that it was just a dream! But where's the blood on his wrist? What is the key in your jacket pocket?
A man is accused of a crime he did not commit – or did he do? – a classic Alfred Hitchcock story. The only difference is that incomprehensible, at first glance, events find a rational explanation from the master. For all his phobias and outright paranoia, Hitch stands firmly with both feet on the ground. He's not interested in the supernatural. The mother of Norman Bates will not leave her chair, “Bewitched” relies on psychoanalysis, and even in “Birds” the main task of the director is only to scare unhappy viewers, but not to explain the motives of gulls, crows and other birds.
Hollywood, especially in the early days, rarely allowed itself to do this. The audience was promised miracles – they received them: Colin Clive sewed from pieces of dead flesh Boris Karloff, H. B. Warner cast out the soul of a murderer who settled in the body of Carol Lombard (Supernatural, 1933). Crazy scientists ran the ball. And there were also clairvoyants and hypnotists.
Interesting topic, great artists! Hypnotists and seers are two poles of the same gift. The only thing that unites them is that the nature of this gift is unclear neither to the audience nor to the heroes themselves.
I must say, in the number of films dedicated to them, clairvoyants of Old Hollywood are inferior to hypnotists. But if they were characters of the second plan, then the seers were the central heroes around whom the plot was built. Both Claude Raines (The Clairvoyant, 1935) and Edward J. Robinson (The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, 1948) are charlatans who fool the venerable public. The gift appears in them suddenly, under the influence of a meeting with a third person, and brings only suffering. Hollywood visionaries are the direct heirs of Cassandra, whose prophecies no one believed. However, with the gift comes the realization of their responsibility and the need to help others – even at the cost of their own lives, as in the case of the hero Robinson.
Unlike clairvoyants, hypnotists demonstrate their abilities from the beginning, pursuing personal interests and manipulating others. They don't know altruism. And if visionaries can be called creators, then hypnotists are an unconditional evil that destroys everything in its path.
In the movie “Fear in the Night,” it makes itself felt almost by accident. And the viewer can only wonder: we will not see the demonism of John Barrymore (Svengali, 1931) or the affectation of Herbert Lom (The Dark Tower, 1943), we will not feel disgust, as in the case of Louis Calhern (The Man with Two Faces, 1934), we will not experience the involuntary delight that caused Jose Ferrer (Whirlpool, 1949). The evil created by the imagination of Cornell Woolrich and Maxwell Shane is striking in its mundaneness. This means that danger can lie in wait anywhere.
The impersonality of evil is one of the main advantages of the film. The atmosphere of perpetual horror absorbs the hero, and with it the viewer. An ordinary layman gets into some nightmare mirror, from which there is no possibility. Here he is, noir in all his bloodthirsty glory: claustrophobic chamber space, a small man in the face of injustice and spilling over the frame, corroding the soul fear.
But the most interesting thing is that the conditional Good in this film is as impersonal as Evil. Vincent Grayson is an undistinguished bank teller, a random man snatched from the crowd. What makes it remarkable is our knowledge of the future of the actor. Seventeen years later, the fragile big-eyed young man will wear a Starfleet uniform and become Leonard Horatio McCoy, the beloved doctor of millions of Star Trek fans.
For all its merits, it is DeForest Kelly's debut that secures "Fear" a place among the top 250 noirs. And it’s not just the magic of an image that has not yet been created. Shane’s plot is much more important than individual roles, but the charming young actor embodies a hero with whom it is easy to associate himself. Vince Grayson, with his fears and insecurity against evil, is just like any of us. In the end, he manages to win. But there is still justice.
8 out of 10