Jacques Tourneur is a name everybody should know, as he directed three movies everybody should see: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and Out of the Past. He also made a great many other features. Unfortunately, most of those failed to really catch fire. One such film is 1958’s The Fearmakers. This is not be confused with The Freshmakers, a Mentos dark origin story.
This is solidly noir, though of one of my least favorite sub-genres: the threat of the red menace. Dana Andrews plays a Korean War veteran who spent two years in a prison camp. The film opens with him being released from an army hospital. The doctor expresses concerns Andrews could have been brainwashed, establishing the possibility this will be a prototype The Manchurian Candidate.
To my surprise, that isn’t the direction the film goes in, though I kept hoping somebody would call Andrews to ask if he’d like to play some solitaire to pass the time. Instead, the menace is from the public relations firm he helped found. I find it interesting there are concerns expressed over the possibility he had been brainwashed during the war, when he had already been the perpetrator in a kind of mass brainwashing in his pre-war career.
He returns to his offices, only to find a new guy at the head of the organization (Dick Foran). Turns out Andrews’s former partner in the firm was killed by a hit-and-run driver. That happened immediately after he sold Andrews’s interest in the firm to Foran. I’m not sure how that was legal, even if that partner had been given power of attorney by Andrews before enlisting.
Andrews meets with a Senator (Roy Gordon) who helped get prisoners of war such as himself released. Gordon has concerns about PR firms such as the ones Andrews founded suddenly marketing political candidates in the same manner any commercial goods are sold. In particular, he suspects the poll numbers are being manipulated. I imagine this guy would have an aneurysm as soon as he saw how widespread public misinformation in politics is today. Andrews would likely find himself in the morgue right to next to the Senator, given his umbrage: “What’s our batting average for honesty if we start packaging politicians?”
Our protagonist agrees to swallow his pride and go undercover at the agency that bears his name, but as a subordinate of Foran’s. He immediately butts head with a nebbish wearing thick glasses who is the top man’s second-in-command. I was very surprised to later learn this was singer Mel Tormé in that role. Andrews is intent on seeing the master cards of the polling participants, and Tormé and Foran sternly refuse to let him see these.
The cards are kept in a locked filing cabinet in Foran’s office, presumably right next to the Glengarry leads. There’s a rather suspenseful bit of business to get those cards, where Andrews ropes in smitten secretary Marilee Earle to help get the key for him. Alas, this scheme becomes laughable at the point it should have been most unnerving, as Andrews proceeds to light a cigarette while going through the cards in Foran’s office. I was astonished our supposedly intelligent protagonist decides to fill the air of a room he should be in with cigarette smoke, even leaving the butt in the ashtray as further evidence of his presence. Even worse, when Foran and a hoodlum associate (Kelly Thordsen) inevitably show up, they somehow fail to notice the scent of fresh smoke in the room. Maybe their sense of smell was ruined by their own tobacco habits.
There’s an odd subplot with Thordsen and Veda Ann Borg as husband-and-wife subversives. Andrews had rented a room from them, per a recommendation from a professor he happened to sit next to on a flight (Oliver Blake). Thordsen and Borg don’t keep a tidy house, which, in a film of this vintage, might as well be a giant neon sign saying they are Commies. That, and she apparently makes a lousy cup of coffee. I bet that filthy Red doesn’t even smoke.
What I don’t understand is why they don’t make any kind of effort to keep Andrews there, as they are clearly part of the devious scheme involving his PR agency. Thordsen even starts throwing punches at the guy. If Communism was supposedly such a threat, why are these people presented as so thoroughly inept?
Even the early scene with Blake on the airplane telegraphed the nature of the subversion to come. The professor claims the represent the Commission of the Abolition of Nuclear Warfare. In the 1950’s, a scientist trying to prevent the end of the human race could only mean one thing, and that’s the Red Menace. Why, it would be downright un-American to not want everybody on the planet to be potentially annihilated at the push of a single button.
The Fearmakers could have been better, but it also could have been a lot worse. I’m sure it’s easier to roll one’s eyes at the Commie menace plot now than it was at the time. But there is one thing the movie is unnervingly prescient about, and that is the manipulation of media to distort public opinion concerning politics. Sadly, that hits home even more today than it did at the time.
Dir: Jacques Tourneur
Starring Dana Andrews, Paul Foran, Marilee Earle
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema VII