Fear is a victim of its own ambitions; director Alfred Ziesler tries to do too much with too little in this low-budget programmer for Poverty Row studio Monogram. To some extent Ziesler succeeds, with the help of art director Frank Sylvos, who did Phil Karlson's noir 99 River Street, and cinematographer Jackson Rose, who photographed Edward L. Cahn's Destination Murder in 1950 (see my posts on both the Cahn and Karlson films). The limited sets are simple and gritty, even if everything looks as if it were taking place in a corner somewhere, while the camera often moves effectively to close-ups rather than cutting and Ziesler directs "stars" Peter Cookson, Anne Gwynne and Warren William appropriately in this world of hash houses and rooming houses, students and pawn brokers, based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
Cookson is out of money for food, room and student tuition in his last year of medical school. He robs and kills a professor who is also a pawnbroker and receives the next day a check for $1000 from "The Periodical Review" for a Nietzschean article about how some people are above the law. The article is read by detective Warren Willian and a cat-and-mouse game begins, with Cookson so tormented he considers suicide before confessing to his girlfriend Anne Gwynne and then getting killed as he crosses a street against the light; then he wakes up and it's all been a bad dream. Perhaps Monogram felt it was still too close to the end of the war for a downbeat ending and perhaps Ziesler was influenced by the similar ending of Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window from 1944; American Ziesler had known Lang when Ziesler had worked in Germany, before they both fled the Nazis.
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