The Fearmakers

The Fearmakers

The Fearmakers

The Fearmakers

Other than the enjoyment of watching Dana Andrews, the Fearmakers is a shallow, trite, and sloppily written film that spends more time lecturing than entertaining. A relic of the Cold War, the characters drone on about how wrong it is for agencies to manipulate public opinion, while manipulating public opinion is the whole purpose of the film. The movie does well enough on some basics. Led by Dick Foran, the villains are sly and ruthless. Good-girl Marilee Earle is naïve and pretty. Dana Andrews is Dana Andrews, not particularly acting but keeping the story moving. For the rest, the sets look cheap, and costumes are off the rack, and the plot becomes entirely predictable as the hero "exposes" the evil communists in our midst. Little effort is made to create clever dialog or even build-up suspense, as it's obvious from the early scenes what has already happened and where the story is going. If someone is looking for the kind of political moralizing that would have made Joe McCarthy happy, this film has it. Otherwise it's just a lot of speeches.

I happened on this film by accident one afternoon and was quietly surprised. I am a fan of film noir and thought this film would be along those lines. And it was a bit in that fashion.( "The Killers" starring Burt Lancaster is one of my favorite examples of the film noir genre). But mostly this movie is centered on Washington D.C. in the late 1950's, and the beginnings of what today is considered lobbying. How the movie reflects our capitol today is almost eerie, with our poll takers and vested interests. Downright prophetic in its nature, I found the correlations between that era and today striking. Witness the beginnings of how you're votes are bought. Disturbing to say the least. I gave the film a "7" rating, because although the movie is worth a look,it is a bit "dated" and does have some "cheese" in the acting.

Joe McCarthy may have been censored by his Senate colleagues four years earlier and may have been dead a year, but his spirit lives on in The Fearmakers. That's a pity because the film actually did have some interesting things to say about the advertising industry and high priced lobbyists and most of all the manipulation of polls to get the desired results. Dana Andrews has come home from Korea where he was captured and subjected to some patented Communist brainwashing techniques. Still suffering from symptoms of their torture methods, Andrews is still hoping to resume his career in a small Washington, DC based public relations firm. But when he returns he discovers his partner dead and Dick Foran taken over and expanding operations quite a bit. His clients include some shady lobbyists and some Communist fellow travelers pushing peace at any price. At the suggestion of an investigating US Senator, Andrews goes in to get the goods on Foran. It's very possible his partner may have been murdered. Mel Torme is in this film in a straight dramatic role, totally unrecognizable in horn rimmed glasses and a mustache. Torme plays Foran's computer nerd though he shows he's got some urges that demonstrate computers aren't all he's interested in. Without the heavy right wing ideological bent The Fearmakers does have some interesting things to say. If the producers had only left that out.

Any anti-communist film is guaranteed to bring forth accusations of promoting or defending the 'red scare'. These accusations invariably come from historical illiterates. These deep thinking leftist critics are so well informed that they do not even know that the release of the Venona Papers largely vindicated the McCarthy investigations. These sneering historical illiterates need to learn about large-scale communist aggression that the West was facing at the time. For example, the communists insurgencies in Greece and Malaya, both backed by the Soviets. Then there was the takeover of Eastern Europe followed by imprisonment, torture and execution of opponents. Then there was the 1948 Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, the Berlin uprising in 1953 and the 1956 Hungarian uprising that the Soviets ruthlessly crushed. The Cold War was anything but cold and was the creation of an aggressive Soviet Union. Before any more mal-educated leftists decide to start sneering at anti-communist movies perhaps they will tell us why they choose to ignore the 100,000,000, people that communist regimes murdered. ("The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression", Harvard University Press,1999). Read this book and you might start thinking that anti-communist movies were not too far out after all and that the left's cry of 'red scare' is as phony as a $3 bill, and every freedom-loving person had every reason to fear communism. Like all movies "The Fearmakers' has its flaws. However, its portrayal of communism is nothing to be ashamed of nor is it something that deserves mockery.

The Fearmakers is one of the last films directed by Jacques Tourneur. He made it soon after completing his Night of a Demon which also starred Dana Andrews in the title role and which now is considered a horror classic and by many even his masterpiece. Unfortunately such words don't apply to The Fearmakers, which had most certainly marked beginning of Tourneur's decline. The film is based on a book by Darwin Teilhet, which was published in 1945. The main character Allen Eaton (Dana Andrews) is a Korean War veteran who has recently returned from Korea where he had been a prisoner of war for the last two years. When back in U.S., he learns that one of his best friends was killed not a long time ago under unclear circumstances. He naturally wants to find out about the reasons for his death as much as he can. Meanwhile he finds a job at a poll agency and very soon discovers that the poll results are being manipulated with the intent of causing a disturbance and fear among the population as well as twisting public's opinion concerning certain important political figures. Soon he finds his life in danger when he discovers that what he is in contact with is a powerful underground organization operating in the U.S., which is apparently responsible for his friend's death as well. The Fearmakers might be called a typical 1950s Cold War period movie and a kind of predecessor of 1962 The Manchurian Candidate. But unlike John Frankenheimer's masterpiece, The Fearmakers has almost nothing remarkable about it neither in terms of the story nor in terms of acting. See The Manchurian Candidate instead. 5/10

Dana Andrews was taken prisoner during the Korean War and finally arrives home after being away for many years. But now he has periodic dizzy spells as a result of his brutal captivity. When he goes to Washington to meet his old business partner at a public relations office, he learns that his partner is dead and the business was sold out from under him to a guy that is obviously a jerk. After storming out of the office, Andrews meets with an old friend, a Senator, and learns that his old firm is doing a lot to distort truth and influence opinion--as they are a probable front group. Oddly, they never say "communist", but it's obvious that's what they intend. So, in order to expose this evil plot, Andrews returns and makes nice with the jerk and joins the firm. Generally, it's a pretty good curio of the time and it is one of the few chances you'll get to see Mel Tormé in an important role (though, oddly, he gets very low billing despite all his screen time). As always Andrews is very good, but towards the very end of the film the writers make a bad gaff--making the otherwise decent film really clichéd. This is when Andrews catches the baddies and is holding a gun on them. Just then, of all times, he gets a blinding headache and drops his gun!!! Come off it, this is just ridiculous and sets up an unnecessary final chase scene. Also, it's rather funny that the things the firm is doing to illegitimately influence public opinion and Congress are EXACTLY the same things many organizations do regularly today!! One example in the film is how they ask loaded questions that make it appear the public feels one way when they don't--something we see on news shows all the time today! Overall, it's not a great film but interesting enough to make it a little better than just a time passer, though fans of Andrews (like me) will probably enjoy it.

Not enough can be said about the de-evolution of the packaging of our politicians and expectations of our news media. The societal rumblings of big brother control and the awareness of the effect and success of Edward Bernays book of blueprints to "guide" the people...Propaganda (1928)...began to surface in the 1950's and then sank as fast as Jimmy Carter's presidency. This post Mccarthy era movie is gallantry trying to stay on that noble course, but the subject matter is too complex for this type of production to do anything but reduce the rhetoric to a great effort of B-Movie making. There is so much here just waiting to be exorcised and exposed, and it is exasperating today to understand that this is an embryonic idea that was born of an ideal and died of an apathetic populace that got the government and the media they deserve. You will find few films filled with as much fulfilled prophecy as this.