Robbery with Violence

So, Jacques Bergerac was in GIGI and LES GIRLS but his career wasn’t moving fast, so he produced a star vehicle, FEAR NO MORE. And he’s perfectly good in it, but maybe a mistake to make a Hitchcockian thriller where the woman has a far better role. And she’s played by Mala Powers, kind of a B-movie person but gifted.

It’s a psychological thriller — Powers, fresh from a stay in a psychiatric hospital, is travelling by train when she’s held up and knocked out by an armed felon. When she wakes up he’s dead, and a cop is holding her responsible. Fortunately, though it doesn’t seem so at first, when fleeing she’s nearly run over by Bergerac, and he gets dragged into the mystery, where every other person seems to contradict her story — strong shades of THE LADY VANISHES, massive amounts of gaslighting.

At around this point, I realised the film was a thinly-veiled rip-off of Carol Reed’s THE GIRL IN THE NEWS (1940). In some ways it slightly improves on that plot, and it has more atmosphere — not having yet discovered the Deutsch tilt, Reed hadn’t yet become the super-stylish thriller director of THE THIRD MAN, and rather than having been suspected of a murder in the past, like Margaret Lockwood in TGITN, Powers’ stay in a mental institution casts her as an unreliable central character.

The bad guys’ plot starts to unravel well before the end, and once they’re bickering and resorting to desperate improvisations, the gig is up and the suspense peters out a little. Bergerac may have been shrewd after all in opting to be Joseph Cotten in GASLIGHT rather than Charles Boyer in GASLIGHT, because as the only person who’ll believe Powers, and a guy who has multiple opportunities to disengage from the crazy plot but instead stays by her side, he wins a lot of sympathy, and if you want to be a male lead that’s certainly useful. And it would be easy for a Frenchman to get typed in shifty roles in 1961. But at least there’d be regular work in that.

Apparently TV scriptwriter Leslie Edgley adapted the film from his own novel — easy to see how he’d have felt more confident ripping off a movie in book form first, though it’s possible he arrived at the gimmick semi-honestly, by reconfiguring bits of popular plot into what he honestly thought was a new form.

This is TV director Bernard Wiesen’s only feature — a shame, as he does OK. He gets good help from ace cinematographer Ernest Haller, who had done MILDRED PIERCE and half of GONE WITH THE WIND but was for some reason going through a B-movie and TV phase, which would be somewhat relieved by the following year’s WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (Still cheap as chips, but high-profile.) The movie has the B-noir early-sixties stark quality which isn’t as expressionistic and intense as classic 40s stuff, but feels cold and threatening, with a toe in vérité realism, a toe in TV flatness, which comes to dominate the sunlit later scenes.

Paul Glass crafts an effective and unusual score, which perhaps netted him the somewhat similar BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING — though LADY IN A CAGE comes in between. He ought to have had a better career, those are all terrific, original and creepy scores.

If the film industry were in better shape, less overcrowded and uncertain, the strong work by everyone concerned might have led more quickly to better jobs all round. Alas, no — almost everyone was back in TV guest spots before the celluloid had dried on this one.