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| Images courtesy of Columbia Pictures |
British actor David Hemmings best known for Michelangelo
Antonioni’s 1966 existential mystery sensation Blowup was at the height
of his screen popularity across the United Kingdom and particularly Italy. After co-founding the Hemdale Film
Corporation with John Daly, the actor started appearing in proto-giallo fare
like Eye of the Devil and eventually actual gialli ala Dario Argento’s
1975 classic Deep Red. Between those
years, Hemmings crossed paths with frequent television director Richard C.
Sarafian and just a year before immortalizing his career with the Barry Newman
starring iconic actioner Vanishing Point, the director and actor paired
up for one of the more unusual if not off the wall proto-giallo offshoots that’s
frankly every bit as nebulously weird and difficult to categorize as Mike
Hodges’ Pulp which also posited an Englishman in Italy as a fish out of
water.
Based on John Bingham’s 1965 novel of the same name, Fragment
of Fear follows former drug addict Tim Brett (David Hemmings) who has
written a book about his experience and recovery a year later and is visiting his
wealthy aunt at an Italian hotel when the next day her lifeless body shows up
at a tour site in Pompeii. Amid the
funeral organized by the hotel owner suspicious of Brett, he forms an unlikely
rapport with a woman named Juliet (Gayle Hunnicutt) who initially discovered
his aunt’s body and they wind up getting engaged. Frustrated with the police investigation, he
starts hunting down his own clues after meeting up with some of his aunt’s
friends and relatives but not before he starts receiving threatening phone
calls and comes home to discover someone has left a wicked cackle on his tape
recorder while he was away. From here,
Brett finds himself besieged by masked assailants, finds complete strangers conspiring
against him and an undercover government agent informs our bewildered hero not
all is as it seems.
A bit of an investigative mind-game starting out in the same
arena as Blowup before veering more towards a kind of Footprints meets
Under the Silver Lake neo-noir as psychodrama, Fragment of Fear penned
by Murder on the Orient Express screenwriter Paul Dehn presented a
unique challenge for both the studio and for moviegoers expecting a “phantasmagoria
of fright” and getting something else entirely.
Partially a whodunit, partially a neurotic exercise in paranoia and a
sense of encroaching danger as our hero doing his own work finds himself an
unlikely suspect in the process, it introduces the viewer to a wide variety of
mostly elderly characters including Arthur Lowe from the especially weird The
Ruling Class while featuring a colorful ensemble cast of Italian and
English veterans.
Lushly lensed by renowned cinematographer Oswald Morris of
Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita and Carol Reed’s Oliver!, the world of Fragment
of Fear despite being awash with lurking danger and paranoia like most
gialli before and ahead of it is scenic and picturesque with lots of
architecture for David Hemmings to run around in. The score by Johnny Harris is uncharacteristically
jazzy and feels almost ambivalent to the proceedings though it does have a kind
of breezy cool to it. The film while
boiled down primarily to David Hemmings with his piercing gaze and sharp eyes
that could spell either fear or menace features many character actors including
but not limited to the aforementioned Arthur Lowe, A Clockwork Orange star
Philip Stone and The Third Man actor Wilfrid Hyde-White. Mostly though, the Italian architecture,
streets and countryside become almost like a rabbit-hole labyrinth for our perplexed
hero to tumble down.
Released in September 1970 in the United Kingdom followed by
a North American release a year later, the film despite the scenery and screen
presence of David Hemmings frustrated audiences and critics who were expecting
a straight-laced genre thriller and instead got something a little more offbeat. In an age now where films like the
aforementioned Pulp are being reevaluated and reappraised, however,
filmgoers accustomed to just going along with a movie’s strange logic are
likely to enjoy the unexpected detours this thing takes you down. Fans of David Hemmings eager to excavate much
of the actor’s lesser known but no less valuable outings will find much to wade
over here and even those likely to come up vexed will still get some
entertainment value out of it. Not every
movie needs to neatly tie everything up in a bow or deliver on our misguided
expectations.
--Andrew Kotwicki
