Fear

“In the midst of life we are in death,” reads a pamphlet from the Eternal Cosmos Society in Alfred Zeisler’s Fear, a poor man’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, whose miniscule budget engenders both a dreamy quality and an extra sleazy atmosphere in which an elite university student can still come across as a desolate, penniless soul. The novel’s anti-heroic Raskolnikov is replaced with Larry Crain (Peter Cookson), a sensitive college student who, unable to pay his tuition, bludgeons Stanley (Francis Pierlot), a professor and part-time pawnbroker, and raids the strongbox for cash. Captain Burke (Warren William) leads the murder investigation, drawn to Crain by clues (a coat’s fibers, an essay he penned called “Men Above the Law”) and by Crain’s nervous, recalcitrant demeanor (“Stop playing cat and mouse!”). While available prints of the film are practically in tatters, Zeisler, to his credit, injects creative, low-budget visual techniques like when Crain is surrounded by composite images (a black cat, a noose, a knife, a gun) as he trudges, zombie-like and overcome by guilt, past a “Death is Just Around the Corner” sign on the sidewalk and steps in front of a train. What’s sure to disappoint viewers, however, is Zeisler’s inexplicable ending, which rips the guts out of the novel and surely has Fyodor turning in his grave.