La Paura

Another of the foreign-language movies that was getting close to the point of expiring from my DVR, forcing me to watch it and do a post on it now, is another one that I have to admit to not knowing anything about before it showed up on TCM: Fear.

The movie has a bit of an interesting provenance. It stars Ingrid Bergman, and was made during the period when she was married to Roberto Rossellini and as such was not exactly sought after in Hollywood. Rossellini, of course, was Italian, and so the version of Fear that TCM ran was in Italian. But, it's based on a story by Austrian author Stefan Zweig, and was a co-production between Italy and West Germany. So Ingrid Bergman is as far as I can tell dubbed her, although more knowledgable viewers may be able to recognize if it's actually her voice.

Bergman plays Irene Wagner, who helps manage the bioengineering plant her husband Albert (Mathias Wiemann) founded in Munich. The movie was released in 1954, which means it's not too long after World War II. Albert having been a scientist, would have been working for the Nazis, and wound up in an internment camp after the war, eventually to be released because West Germany needed a lot of those industrial types who didn't have the best of choices regarding not working for the Nazis. Albert, after having been released from the camp, spent some time in a sanitarium to recover from the stress.

All of that is the back-story, although it's necessary here to establish that Irene was separated from Albert for a substantial period of time. Long enough for her to need some sort of intimate friendship, which she sought out in the form of Erich (Kurt Kreuger). However, with her husband now having been out of the sanitarium for long enough to resume his work, Irene has decided she's going to break off her relationship with Erich.

The only thing is, on the night she's about to do so, she's approached by a woman calling herself Miss Schultze (Renate Mannhardt). Schutze says that she was the former girlfriend of Erich, and as such knows all about the relationship Irene had with Erich. Schultze was recently evicted from her apartment hotel as a result, so she says she needs a bunch of money in order to go way. If Irene doesn't give Schultze that money, she'll have no qualms about seeing Albert and telling him the whole truth.

So Irene gives Schultze some money. This is something that's very bad to do to a blackmailer, since you know the blackmailer isn't going to stop here, especially since all of this has happened in the first ten minutes or so of the movie. Indeed, Miss Schultze keeps showing up and asking for more money. Worse, she shows up unannounced when Irene and Albert go to the philharmonic, which it would seem there's no way Schultze could have known about. The movie has one more big twist from there....

The idea behind Fear is an interesting one, but unfortunately the movie is only 75 minutes long. I say unfortunately because the short running time decidedly gives the impression that Rossellini didn't have a good idea how to resolve everything. (I haven't read the original story, so I don't know how Zweig resolved the conflict in the original.) The movie feels like it ends rather abruptly. Apparently multiple endings were filmed and as a result multiple versions of the film were released in different markets. That, and the film got edited more for a later re-relase.

Fear is a very good idea that just needed an extra 15 to 20 minutes to come up with a more satisfying conclusion.