OK this is the third Dana Andrews movie I've uped this week,Zero Hour! and The Purple Heart being the other two.
The Fearmakers is an American thriller film first released in 1958, directed by Jacques Tourneur. The film is based on a novel by Darwin L. Teilhet and stars Dana Andrews, Dick Foran and Marilee Earle. Our overall rating for this film is: good.
In this drama, a Korean war veteran, a victim of brainwashing while he was a POW, finally goes back to his home in Washington, DC, where he resumes his job at a public relations-opinion research firm. He soon discovers that his company is being run by communists after his partner mysteriously died. Now pro-communist propaganda seems to be their primary business. To stop them, the vet begins cooperating in a full-scale Senate investigation.
Dana Andrews is one of the more iconic actors of the film noir cycle, yet in the grand scheme of things he’s one of the most underappreciated in film history. The image of him standing amidst the hulking carcasses of bombers at the end of The Best Years of Our Lives is so viscerally powerful that the thought of it can bring tears to my eyes. I’ve always admired him as a “film first” kind of guy, meaning that he never allowed his ego to get in the way of his characters. “Low key” for him wasn’t a vapid Hollywood actor’s false modesty; it was his personal way of exploring character and demonstrating faith in his audience’s ability to empathize. He was a fairly regular Joe who suffered through the ups and downs of life as most people do, though it can be argued that he had more than his share of bad luck. That he struggled mightily with alcohol in the years after his career began to decline isn’t surprising — less was known of alcoholism in those days when the evening cocktail was much a part of American culture. It didn’t help that in 1935 he buried a young wife, followed in 1964 by their child. He worked as he found it in his later years, and died without fanfare in the early nineties. His body of work is extraordinary, and it’s easy to imagine that his screen persona was probably not much different than the man in real life.
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