$2.49 a pound, but you’ll save more if you buy in bulk.
1956 noir The Price of Fear has an interesting premise. Lex Barker plays a man on the hook for two crimes. Given the timing of them, he could only have committed one or the other. Fact is, he committed neither.
Merle Oberon was responsible for the one of the crimes, a hit-and-run. She plays a successful businesswoman, which is a surprisingly progressive aspect for a film of this era. Unfortunately, her character eventually devolves into something along the lines of “why can’t I be a successful wizard of finance and a woman, too?” In keeping with movies of that time (and, honestly, still largely an issue to this day), she has to compartmentalize these into mutually exclusive mindsets. That context switching must be a mofo.
After accidentally mowing down an old man walking his dog in the street, Oberon stopped at a phone booth to call the police when the ultimate lucky break happens: Barker steals her car. Improbable as this may sound (and it is still highly improbable), at the same time she’s in the booth, he’s running from the henchmen of mobster Warren Stevens.
Stevens had just arranged for Tim Sullivan (poor guy—not even a profile pic on IMDB as I write this) to be shot from a moving vehicle and claims he witnessed Barker firing the shot. This is a neat little trick Stevens has pulled off. Just an hour or so before, Barker had threatened to kill Sullivan if he ever saw him again. One shouldn’t make threats like that, especially in a crowded nightclub.
Barker was irate because he and Sullivan were partners in a dog track and the latter sold his interest to Sullivan. Never mind he did this under some pretty extreme duress, only signing after four of his ribs are broken by Stevens’s thugs.
If Barker is convicted for the murder, it means the chair for him, and Sullivan will have full ownership of the track. I don’t know how lucrative dog racing is, but it seems strange to me that torture and murder would be involved in securing a track.
The legal system may be goofy now, but it has nothing on the disparity between punishments in the 1950’s. Oberon makes a comment about how, if Barker is convicted for vehicular manslaughter, it will be four years or so, but he will get the chair for the murder of Sullivan. Four years vs capital punishment, and seemingly nothing in between those extremes. I may be uncertain as to what the price of fear is, but the cost of human life seems to vary pretty wildly based on circumstances.
I like the plot of this film, even as preposterous as it is. A police sergeant, and friend of Barker’s, asks Oberon at one point if she knows the odds of a car being stolen twice within the span of an hour. She says she never calculated those odds. I bet they’re pretty bad, but likely not as much as those of a man fleeing a frame-up for a murder suddenly stealing a car with which another person committed a hit-and-run.
If you can suspend your disbelief, The Price of Fear is a solid noir with a novel conceit built on rather complex machinations for such a film. Recommended for fans of the genre.
Dir: Abner Biberman
Starring Merle Oberon, Lex Barker, Charles Drake
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s Film Noir: Dark Side of Cinema II blu-ray box set