Spoilers Warning Elaborated: Review may contain spoilers for the films "M" (1931) and "The Woman in the Window" (1944), as well as for the novel "Crime and Punishment" and this film, "Fear."
Wow, these guys sure knew their movies. Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment," on the other hand, for which this film is patently an uncredited adaptation--a loosely reworked update notwithstanding--not so much. Indeed, "Fear" is more so a remake (again, uncredited) of another film adaptation of the book, the 1935 Hollywood version of "Crime and Punishment" starring Peter Lorre. I know no other reason for the alteration of the murder weapon from an axe to a poker or for the addition of the protagonist ironically receiving a surprise check for the publication of his article after the crime. Neither of those details appear in the book; both are in the aforementioned 1935 film. One wonders if the filmmakers of "Fear" even read Dostoevsky. They certainly saw some Peter Lorre pictures, though, as well as some by director Fritz Lang--namely, as fellow IMDb reviewer Honus pointed out, "M" and "The Woman in the Window" (I found the allusions to the former blatant, but I wouldn't have caught those to the latter otherwise), although I wouldn't be surprised to discover other references, as well. Bizarrely, the result is a remake that's better than the original adaptation and that's an otherwise faithless adaptation itself that nonetheless manages to thematically translate the novel in intriguing ways by, instead, ripping off still more films (hence my beginning this review with an exclamation).
This is kind of brilliant methinks. I reviewed the 1935 film before this in my quest to see a bunch of movie versions of Dostoevsky's text after reading it, and in that review I complained about my disappointment in a film from a director, Josef von Sternberg, who clearly knew how to make a quality crime picture as evidenced by the early gangster flick "Underworld" (1927) and an actor, Lorre, who had already given the best performance of a wanted murderer to date in Lang's "M." The 1935 picture was a failure, though, as von Sternberg admitted himself. "Fear," then, is a pleasant surprise for me. I had no idea going in that it was essentially going to remake the 1935 film by removing much of the clutter and rubbish I found at fault in the original and replace it with elements from "M," as well as from the noir "The Woman in the Window."
One benefit of this is that many of the minor and unnecessary characters held over from the book to the screen in 1935 are here cut. There's no time in this barely-longer-than-an-hour picture to go into novelistic subplots concerning Raskolnikov's mother and his sister's three suitors, nor of the threat of blackmail from another suspected murderer--all of which the 1935 version clumsily attempted to retain, while also adding a superfluous introduction concerning Raskolnikov's graduation. Nope, "Fear" cuts directly to the meat of the thing by primarily focusing on the relationship of Larry (the Raskolnikov of the film) and Eileen (its Sonya) and the cat-and-mouse game with the police.
Larry seems to murder the pawnbroker (here, he's also a man and a professor--perhaps inspired by Edward G. Robinson's prof from "The Woman in the Window") as much for poverty (he's overdue on the rent, and he's just lost his scholarship for school) as for any political philosophy as written in his article. Although the financial irony of the publication of the article is an invention of adaptation, the article was part of the book, too. It was an ingeniously self-reflexive device there--being literature-within-literature. Besides retaining this, "Fear" aptly adds a mise-en-abyme of a magic act performed on stage involving the swinging of a weapon. This play-within-the-play, or illusion allusion, neatly reflects the killer's actions earlier in the picture--art reflecting life, or rather art reflecting art, the stage reflecting murder.
"M" is an especially clever piece of cinematic reflexivity in its exploitation of the semiotic mark of the letter "M" on the murderer, which is spotted in a window reflection, and mirrors, it should be noted, are analogous to cinema, as well. Both capture and reflect images. These images are signs, or traces, of that which they capture and reflect. "The Woman in the Window" likewise involves window reflections and traces from the crime leaving their mark. Especially in "M," there's the further police business of traces with fingerprints and such (also exploited in "Fear"). And the "M" mark is also a sign in the indexical sense of signifying something (in this case, that he's the murderer). All of this is behind, in this film, Eileen's reading the same letter in Larry's palm and inquiring, "What else begins with M?" For Larry, the incriminating trace involves paint marking his jacket and vise versa.
There's some other good stuff here. The inspector recreates the crime scene by amusingly having his murder suspect reenact his role as the murderer--going further than Robinson's professor revisiting the crime scene with the police in "The Woman in the Window." There's a nice match cut to the scene of Larry buying a new suit. And the framing of his face behind a bird cage at the pawnbroker's flat while eyeballing the Prof's safe is an apt visual metaphor of Larry's potential future behind bars. For a B-picture, that's some good imagery, and I don't so much mind the scratches, speckling and occasional skipped frames of the print I saw, nor that some of the technical values here seem poor, including the lousy sound quality for off-screen dialogue. And I'm more perplexed by than critical of the seemingly unnecessary inclusion of a neighbor providing diegetic music for Larry's apartment, or of the reason for Larry's strange reaction to Eileen presenting a wine bottle. Then, there's the picture's utterly bonkers ending.
Framing the main narrative as a dream seems directly lifted from "The Woman in the Window," and I can see how audiences may have differing reactions to it. For me, I think it's especially ingenious here. As an adaptation, "Fear" had already abandoned all of Dostoevsky's religion and most of the political philosophy, so there's not much point in offering Larry any sort of moralistic regeneration as per the book. "Fear" replaces this with cinematic allusions--traces--to film itself and to the other films it imitates. Why not one more device, dreams, that are analogous to cinema, then. Sure, the "it was all a dream" ploy may've originally been employed by Lang to get around the censoring of the depiction of suicide (and "Fear" suggests a similar scene or two) or getting away with murder, but film has the quality of dreams and, conversely, affects our own imaginations. One may assume that something similar happened to Larry with all of his books--one of which, perhaps, includes "Crime and Punishment," itself a story that includes reflexive doubling and some strange, fevered nightmares.
None of this, however, excuses Larry, once awake, of inquiring of Cathy, "Mind if I call you Eileen?" That's plain creepy.
Wow, these guys sure knew their movies. Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment," on the other hand, for which this film is patently an uncredited adaptation--a loosely reworked update notwithstanding--not so much. Indeed, "Fear" is more so a remake (again, uncredited) of another film adaptation of the book, the 1935 Hollywood version of "Crime and Punishment" starring Peter Lorre. I know no other reason for the alteration of the murder weapon from an axe to a poker or for the addition of the protagonist ironically receiving a surprise check for the publication of his article after the crime. Neither of those details appear in the book; both are in the aforementioned 1935 film. One wonders if the filmmakers of "Fear" even read Dostoevsky. They certainly saw some Peter Lorre pictures, though, as well as some by director Fritz Lang--namely, as fellow IMDb reviewer Honus pointed out, "M" and "The Woman in the Window" (I found the allusions to the former blatant, but I wouldn't have caught those to the latter otherwise), although I wouldn't be surprised to discover other references, as well. Bizarrely, the result is a remake that's better than the original adaptation and that's an otherwise faithless adaptation itself that nonetheless manages to thematically translate the novel in intriguing ways by, instead, ripping off still more films (hence my beginning this review with an exclamation).
This is kind of brilliant methinks. I reviewed the 1935 film before this in my quest to see a bunch of movie versions of Dostoevsky's text after reading it, and in that review I complained about my disappointment in a film from a director, Josef von Sternberg, who clearly knew how to make a quality crime picture as evidenced by the early gangster flick "Underworld" (1927) and an actor, Lorre, who had already given the best performance of a wanted murderer to date in Lang's "M." The 1935 picture was a failure, though, as von Sternberg admitted himself. "Fear," then, is a pleasant surprise for me. I had no idea going in that it was essentially going to remake the 1935 film by removing much of the clutter and rubbish I found at fault in the original and replace it with elements from "M," as well as from the noir "The Woman in the Window."
One benefit of this is that many of the minor and unnecessary characters held over from the book to the screen in 1935 are here cut. There's no time in this barely-longer-than-an-hour picture to go into novelistic subplots concerning Raskolnikov's mother and his sister's three suitors, nor of the threat of blackmail from another suspected murderer--all of which the 1935 version clumsily attempted to retain, while also adding a superfluous introduction concerning Raskolnikov's graduation. Nope, "Fear" cuts directly to the meat of the thing by primarily focusing on the relationship of Larry (the Raskolnikov of the film) and Eileen (its Sonya) and the cat-and-mouse game with the police.
Larry seems to murder the pawnbroker (here, he's also a man and a professor--perhaps inspired by Edward G. Robinson's prof from "The Woman in the Window") as much for poverty (he's overdue on the rent, and he's just lost his scholarship for school) as for any political philosophy as written in his article. Although the financial irony of the publication of the article is an invention of adaptation, the article was part of the book, too. It was an ingeniously self-reflexive device there--being literature-within-literature. Besides retaining this, "Fear" aptly adds a mise-en-abyme of a magic act performed on stage involving the swinging of a weapon. This play-within-the-play, or illusion allusion, neatly reflects the killer's actions earlier in the picture--art reflecting life, or rather art reflecting art, the stage reflecting murder.
"M" is an especially clever piece of cinematic reflexivity in its exploitation of the semiotic mark of the letter "M" on the murderer, which is spotted in a window reflection, and mirrors, it should be noted, are analogous to cinema, as well. Both capture and reflect images. These images are signs, or traces, of that which they capture and reflect. "The Woman in the Window" likewise involves window reflections and traces from the crime leaving their mark. Especially in "M," there's the further police business of traces with fingerprints and such (also exploited in "Fear"). And the "M" mark is also a sign in the indexical sense of signifying something (in this case, that he's the murderer). All of this is behind, in this film, Eileen's reading the same letter in Larry's palm and inquiring, "What else begins with M?" For Larry, the incriminating trace involves paint marking his jacket and vise versa.
There's some other good stuff here. The inspector recreates the crime scene by amusingly having his murder suspect reenact his role as the murderer--going further than Robinson's professor revisiting the crime scene with the police in "The Woman in the Window." There's a nice match cut to the scene of Larry buying a new suit. And the framing of his face behind a bird cage at the pawnbroker's flat while eyeballing the Prof's safe is an apt visual metaphor of Larry's potential future behind bars. For a B-picture, that's some good imagery, and I don't so much mind the scratches, speckling and occasional skipped frames of the print I saw, nor that some of the technical values here seem poor, including the lousy sound quality for off-screen dialogue. And I'm more perplexed by than critical of the seemingly unnecessary inclusion of a neighbor providing diegetic music for Larry's apartment, or of the reason for Larry's strange reaction to Eileen presenting a wine bottle. Then, there's the picture's utterly bonkers ending.
Framing the main narrative as a dream seems directly lifted from "The Woman in the Window," and I can see how audiences may have differing reactions to it. For me, I think it's especially ingenious here. As an adaptation, "Fear" had already abandoned all of Dostoevsky's religion and most of the political philosophy, so there's not much point in offering Larry any sort of moralistic regeneration as per the book. "Fear" replaces this with cinematic allusions--traces--to film itself and to the other films it imitates. Why not one more device, dreams, that are analogous to cinema, then. Sure, the "it was all a dream" ploy may've originally been employed by Lang to get around the censoring of the depiction of suicide (and "Fear" suggests a similar scene or two) or getting away with murder, but film has the quality of dreams and, conversely, affects our own imaginations. One may assume that something similar happened to Larry with all of his books--one of which, perhaps, includes "Crime and Punishment," itself a story that includes reflexive doubling and some strange, fevered nightmares.
None of this, however, excuses Larry, once awake, of inquiring of Cathy, "Mind if I call you Eileen?" That's plain creepy.