Fragment of Fear

source: Fragment of Fear

An intriguing thriller with a fine, bewildered performance from David Hemmings. Unfortunately, the film overdoses visually in bizarre for bizzare's sake with a very unsatisfactory ending.

Hemmings in post drug addled state (he sweats profusely throughout) sets out to investigate the murder of his aunt. Comes across like an episode of 'The Prisoner' - is it the lead going mad or are dozens of English character actors out to get him. All very sixties (made in 72) with a deeply intrusive soundtrack - a pleasant enough watch.

This is a complex, involving thriller which requires immediate attention from mystery fans. The clues and puzzles build up thick and fast in this disturbing masterpiece which will have you hooked right from the beginning. The tension builds slowly to breaking point at the film's conclusion. Then comes one of those twist endings which totally changes your perception of the rest of the film. As you might have guessed, I absolutely loved this film. It has the same style and atmosphere as many Italian-made gialli which is somewhat surprising, seeing as it's a British film. The Italian links are even stronger seeing as it shares the hero of one of Argento's best films, DEEP RED, namely David Hemmings. There's a definite feeling of the "swinging sixties" in the jazzy, upbeat music which plays frequently and the crisp colour photography really brings the surroundings and characters to life. David Hemmings is a charismatic and talented actor who conveys well the haunting expressions and outbursts of a disturbed man. He is supported by a good cast of British stalwarts, popping up in minor roles are the seemingly-omnipotent Wilfrid Hyde-White, plus Daniel Massey, Arthur Lowe and others. Fans of recent conspiracy thrillers will enjoy the conspiracy and paranoia surrounding Hemmings in this film, and it's one of those movies in which you aren't really sure what's happening, so needs to be seen at least twice. This is a thoroughly entertaining, intelligent thriller which remains riveting from start to finish.

A movie with Hemmings, Gayle Hunnicutt, Adolfo Celi (a serviceable supporting player), W. H. White, about insanity, severe delusions, grief, very accomplished unpretentious craftsmanship, it's not artsy, but stylish, lavish, colorful; the style is a European synthesis, not only British, but continental as well …. Very suspenseful, one of the most accomplished genre movies, of an ineffable freshness; the sense of creepiness is as efficient as nuanced and sober. It has an undertone of distorted sexuality, the predilection for aged women, Bunface and the schoolgirls, the eerie but certain appeal of the aged ladies, those kisses; the focus is on eyes, mouths, thighs in their shameless bare luxuriance. Tim Brett's flat gives a very suggestive sense of the place. The young women appear as naked thighs, and so does the seductress in the train, the temptress who knows the writer's address. Also, the leading character's 1st shot shows his legs. Those thighs symbolize the access, not as much denied (by the women), as repellent. He feels threatened by the walk, by the bride's walk …. The male characters, beginning with the copper who visits him, are paternal symbols. They are burly. The women's thighs are viscous. The women are cold, tempting, indifferent, desired. The writer resents them. Force, desire, dream, deceit; he feels deceived, and resents health, the insanity proves a stronger temptation than the drugs he used to take. In its depiction of the insanity, the movie shows the feverish phony cleverness of the delusion, with its crippling mistrust; and it's not a moralizing stance, but a clinical one, the twilight of a mind, clinically depicted. The addiction is a _crippleness, and the leading character ends in a wheelchair, i. e. denying himself almost everything, deprived of walk and deprived of rest, unable to walk, unable to rest, dominated by his wife, defeated. The puzzling plot has been meant to be dreamlike. The eerie, spooky story-line from the standpoint of insanity had a worthy career in the cinema, and occasioned other movies as well. Both leads give apposite performances. It's impressive how both of them understood the requirements of their roles. Gayle Hunnicutt is decorative, and her role required a bland act, she had to be a decorative doll. Hemmings made me think of a plumper and more urbane Dean; what might seem like overacting actually suits his part, suggesting the behavior of a psychotic, the feverish, sometimes frenzied behavior.

This was a total waste of time and energy; I nearly put my foot through the telly.

I felt this could have been so much better and began to temporarily tire of it somewhere around the halfway mark and then it lifted and ran pretty well to the end. David Hemmings seemed a bit limp and Gayle Hunnicutt almost asleep but then maybe it was the erratic script. I guess there is also the problem where a film is going to have different levels of reality that not all can be made too transparently clear. There is a wonderful cameo from Wilfred Hyde-White and things certainly pick up with the appearance of Daniel Massey and Arthur Lowe. Apart from the dialogue being rather lacklustre at times and some scenes going on a tad too long, the music is completely wrong. I have seen the score by Johnny Harris highly praised and possibly outside of the film the jazzy music is fine but here it is too loud, too obvious and basically, bloody annoying. Despite all this, the film remains likable enough and certainly worth a look.

Fragment of Fear is a film that has somehow slipped under the radar since its release in 1970 and that's a real shame as while the film does have a few narrative problems; this is excellently produced and well worked mystery thriller that really does deserve to be more seen. The film is halfway between a murder mystery and a psychological thriller and director Richard C. Sarafian gives both halves of the film equal credence as the focus is stretched across the central character's questionable mental health and the murder of his aunt that he is investigating. The central character is Tim Brett; he's a reformed drug addict living in Italy. He returns to London when his aunt is found murdered and begins asking people who knew his aunt questions. It's not long before strange things start happening to him; his flat is broken into, he receives a letter that was written on his own typewriter and gets strange phone calls. It soon transpires that someone doesn't want Tim investigating. But naturally, considering he was a drug user, nobody will believe him... Some have labelled this film as a British Giallo; I don't agree that such a thing exists personally, but Fragment of Fear does feature some staples of Italy's finest type of film. The murder mystery is a given, but we also have an unseen killer and adding to that is the fact that many Giallo's feature a lead character with a fractured state of mind. The film is lead by the great David Hemmings who puts in a good performance. I was unsure of how he would across as a former drug user given his debonair screen presence, but he actually fits into this role really well and is not hard to believe. Director Richard C. Sarafian keeps the film streamlined and the action focused on the mystery which ensures that Fragment of Fear is always interesting and entertaining. The film gets more exciting as it goes along and it all boils down to a good ending that provides a nice twist and also manages a bit of ambiguity. Overall, it's a real shame that this film is so obscure as it deserves a wider audience and hopefully it will soon be picked up for a DVD release. Recommended if you can find it!

Possible spoilers * Very peculiar and disappointing final few minutes and ending. The music was odd, not appropriate for a thriller, unpleasant and intrusive screeching flute and bongos. It was nice to see those great old British actors, all gone now, in 2018. The pigeon did a good job too! And don't forget the geranium, very effective in its bit part. After the big revelation about what the murdered woman was really doing, the story just meandered along, not doing much of anything except terrorizing Hemmings till he's limp as a dishrag in a wheelchair. And why was the laughing man laughing so much? Just happy to be terrorizing, I guess. I'm sort of glad I saw it, if only for the good acting, but the plot just wasn't much. A piece of junk, basically.

How much you like Fragment of Fear depends on how much you've seen of the type of film it is. David Hemmings believes some sort of peculiar conspiracy behind the murder of his rich aunt and he goes about his way to prove it back in London, except he gets his apartment broken into, strange messages and cackling laughter mysteriously appear on his tape recorder, and someone appears to have sent him a warning letter written on his own paper with his own typewriter. There's a girl on the side which he wants to marry and he's had a drug problem a few years back so that no one around him believes his ravings about a secret society out to silence him because he used to be a dope fiend. We even get the "we have no such person working here" mystery man cliché and if you're reading this, chances are you've seen variations of all this in one form or another. So form is where the movie must distinguish itself except its ambitions never rise to the occasion. Great movies in this "losing a grip on reality" mystery/thriller niche were made at around the same time and Fragment of Fear can't measure up to them because a lot of what is ambiguous here is mostly a series of plot points and there's very little of a metaphorical/poetic nature, a key by which to render Hemmings' struggle a metaphor for something else. It can't measure up to something like Roeg's Don't Look Now or Weir's The Last Wave because this is still mostly a thriller, with all the noise and alarm and the sound and fury of a hunt, this not dying away in the distance to reveal something potentially meaningful about the condition of a fragile man trying to hold onto his pieces as his world bears him false witness, not until the end at least when the movie retreats with a maddened Hemmings inside his head for a final showpiece where "creepy old peoples' faces" stare ominously in the wide-angle lens of the camera and the the movie disappears on board a train through a dark tunnel and emerges on the other side on a grey lonely beachwalk where psychodrama and "twisty" horror thriller are allowed to finally converge. This is not a bad movie by any means but something in it tells me Richard Sarafian may not have been the best man for the job. He turns in something that is competent and borderline successful but it lacks the intuitive mark of a director who's making his kind of film. The problem here is that the movie posits itself as something ambiguous except it's mostly literal and straightforward. When David Hemmings goes mad we know it not a second too late. Sarafian probably felt more comfortable in the grit and dust of Vanishing Point and Man in the Wilderness, films which are at once more metaphoric in their conception and poetic in execution, but it's still a bit puzzling that he didn't make something more out of Fragment of Fear.