User Reviews

LA PAURA is probably Roberto Rossellini's (RR) most Hollywood-like film, and in fact initially it also came out in an English language version, besides the original Italian.

According to Italian critic Adriano Apra, much of what happens in this movie actually reflects the deteriorating relationship between RR and Bergman, in which RR had cheated on Bergman from early on, poisoning their link as much as the curare that is injected into rats at Professor Wagner's lab.

Prof Wagner is aware that his wife, Irene (Bergman), is double-timing him, and he uses Luisa Vidor (played by Renate Mannhardt) to enforce blackmail that will ultimately cause Irene to realize the extent of the consequences to her devious behavior.

B&W photography is superb, mirroring the turvy depths of a relationship resting on deception and blackmail - and the fear of the film's title, because if you throw together a cheater, a blackmailer in love and his ruthless sidekick, and the lies that accompany the entire process on all sides, you have the recipe for tragedy.

Curiously, RR made three endings to the film. Back in the 1990s, I watched an Italian language copy in which Prof Wagner terminates the relationship, leaving Irene high and dry. Recently, I acquired an English language copy in which Wagner and Irene exchange words of love and apparent forgiveness at the end.

The original book by Stefan Zweig was no masterpiece, I think RR did a good job of transferring the material to the screen, elevating its quality in the process.

Certainly, LA PAURA is well worth watching, not just because it has the peerless Ingrid Bergman as the central character, but because it is well made.

This appears to have been mysteriously lost when the history of cinema was being written. It is a hard film to place anyway. Rossellini had hit his stride and was on his way out of the public mind, it's far from the neorealism he became famous for, it's not lurid enough to pass as noir. Antonioni had not yet arrived at Cannes to reinvent the vision present here inside a modernist framework. All this is made worse by the meddling of Italian distributors, anxious for ticket sales. Subsequent generation of film-watchers would have stumbled (if at all) upon something too small, an unfulfilling, incomplete affair.

But like so many of these flawed pieces, it is endlessly fascinating. Rossellini was blessed with a gift; his work is not the result of a fiery intuition bursting forth, but of a studied, assured awareness. Grasping and what is grasped become one in his films. It's hard to conceive the great Antonioni, who was so inspired by him and who really opened up what Rossellini contained within a religious language, without a film like this or Stromboli.

From a distance, it's simple enough: a story of marital infidelity (which, like Stromboli, inadvertently resonates out of the film and into the illicit love Bergman and Rossellini shared), about a woman's descend into paranoid fear and delusion. An image of the fractured self, painfully learning the lesson that makes whole. Between grief and nothing, as Faulkner would have it.

But such richness of appearances. How inner disturbance seeps outside; in the piano concert scene, notice how the music swells from placid to nerve-wracking crescendo. Notice the downpour that accompanies the razorblade-edge crisis of conscience. When the noose begins to be pulled tight around her neck as the husband inquires about a missing ring, faces are drowned in a sludge of shadow like out of Weimar noir.

Further inside; the threatening image of the ogre-father to be appeased, with the daughter and wife one before his gaze. He holds the keys to both punishment and forgiveness. The suffering and humiliation born from delusion and desire, and how they trap the soul in chimeras.

The other thing I want to stand on is what was originally intended of the compromised vision we have available. Rossellini's daughter is reportedly working to restore the original, a time-consuming affair in most cases, but until then this is all we have.

A fishing scene is missing and tiresomely expositional monologue is added in two scenes; from what I could gleam, the opening and finale. Both marvelous renditions of wanderings through night streets, itself an aesthetic ahead of the times. And then the most important thing of all, that pushes the film into cinematic apotheosis. The finale, which the distributors meddled to turn into a cloying sentimentality that ensures closure and balance.

Rossellini intended the film to end with a suicide attempt (we see the prelude, with Irene writing her suicide note), but then she thinks of her children and returns home. Rossellini shot footage of this. The footage comprises two shots; one is the shot filmed from inside a car crossing idyllic countryside to reach the remote cottage house, the other is Irene in her favorite armchair as her childhood nanny soothes her.

Both these shots were repeated earlier in the film, when Irene and her husband first get to the cottage. To the place where Irene grew up, where her children are now. Childhood comfort is possible there, as refuge from the punishing dead-ends of adult life. We see her, as again in the finale, reclining on her armchair with her nanny by her side.

So we have in th end Irene anguishing over her suicide note on her desk; then her regressive trip back into the place of comfort. Whatever end we get in the coming restoration, this is one of the most potent finales in pre-60's cinema, the suicide all there disguised as the journey back.

Terrible indeed and admirably performed by that beautiful woman and great actress named Ingrid Bergman, a story directed by her husband the also great film director Roberto Rossellini. A married woman whose husband is a prominent professor has an adulterous relationship with another man. Suddenly a former lover of that man appears and begins to blackmail her demanding high money sums and threatening to tell everything her husband. She is then upset by fear and begins to cede to blackmail. Later we learn that this was planned by her husband with perhaps not very clear intentions. When she knows this she is psychologically destroyed and plans to kill herself of which she is saved by her husband at the last moment and they show that afterwards they love each other. Of course it is psychologically possible that a woman loves two men simultaneously although in different ways (or a man two women). The movie is therefore authentic. Although not exactly a masterpiece this movie is worth to be seen for its intense dramatic atmosphere in what concerns Ingrid Bergman's role and the very good performance of actors and actresses.

"Non credo più all'amore (La paura)" or simply "Fear" is a co-production between West Germany and Italy that resulted in a black-and-white movie from 1954, so this one is already way over 60 years old. It was co-written and directed by Roberto Rossellini and the main character is once again played by his (then still) wife Ingrid Bergman. According to IMDb, this one is slightly longer than 80 minutes, but the version I saw was even 10 minutes shorter, so it is not a long movie at all and there exist several versions. The original work this is based on is by Stefan Zweig and I suggest the recent Maria Schrader video to everybody who is curious about the author. Zweig's involvement may also have to do with the film having the main language German, but I am not too sure if this is accurate looking at the film's title and also the cast. At least the version i watched was exclusively Italian with English subtitles.

This is a story about fear as the title already states and relationship struggles play a major role as well as in many other Bergman films. Moonlighting and blackmailing are crucial components in the story here, but lets be honest, all in all it is really a major Bergman showcase as well and honestly beyond her acting I think the story is not as good as it could have been. If you are a Bergman fan, you will probably enjoy this one as she has several scenes in which she can shine, but I myself have seen not too much from her yet and what I saw here does not really get me curious about her other works or Rossellini's. I myself was glad that the film was over relatively quickly as I cared little for the story or character(s) eventually. I give it a thumbs-down and like I said I only recommend it to the very biggest Bergman fans.

The Italian director Roberto Rossellini is mostly known, and has gained his reputation as a great director mainly for his neorealistic films from the 1940's. However, by the 1950's he had moved on and concentrated on depicting human relations, mostly couples who are going some sort of a marital crisis.

"La paura" (fear in English; actually its original title is "Die Angst", because the film is in German – not like in Germania anno cero, which did take place in Germany, but whose characters spoke Italian) can be seen in continuance with these works, for example with "Viaggio in Italia" (1954), where Ingrid Bergman also plays the female protagonist. "La Paura" focuses on showing the emotional distress and literally the fear of a woman who has had an extra-marital relationship and who is, besides tormented by her infidelity, now being blackmailed by her lover's ex-girlfriend.

In no way could this film be characterized as neorealistic, so obvious is the use of melodramatic music to underline the suspense, and furthermore the film doesn't really criticize the society as it does its individuals in their private affairs (or does it?). Genrewise, it is located somewhere between a melodrama and a psychological thriller. It owes a lot to the German expressionism of the 1920's in its use of shadows and camera angles, and might be defined as somewhat film noirish (which isn't actually a genre, but a style) both in its gloomy imagery and in its ambiguous moral universe. In film noir the world is always a twisted place, where traditional values have been lost and individuals feel alienated, all of which is connected to the threatening urban atmosphere. Normally women are corrupt and not to be trusted, but in this European version the most cruel role plays the husband, who is mercilessly putting his wife on a test, as he himself has hired the girl to blackmail his wife.

One of the most memorable scenes shows Irene Wagner (Bergman) following her husband's crew performing a laboratory test on a guinea pig, where first poison and then antidote are injected in the object-victim. The monotonous and anguish-producing sound from the measurement device makes the scene a small masterpiece, corresponding with and further emphasizing Irene's agony.

The etymology of the original title 'Angst' (anguish) carries within the meaning 'godless', which is not too far-fetched as the film's persons are concerned. Without God there is no homogeneous moral construction, and so no universal ethics or values exist. This can be extended to the end of Great Narratives, which might have existed still in the 1950's, but in general there was no universal guideline to follow. People, individuals, are thrown into a world full of insecurity, and there lives appear to be meaningless. Their actions seem often sporadic and they can't really empathize with other people's feelings. In the end the husband saves her wife from suicide and they embrace each other in fervor, repeating "I love you" – an ending very similar to that of Viaggio in Italia. The film ends very abruptly after having reached its climax, which left me doubtful on the credibility of the outcome and made the solution seem merely a pseudo closure (as David Bordwell calls a closure which seems forced and thus false).

All in all, I recommend this film as another case study on human psyche.

Rossellini's last film with Ingrid Bergman.

Personally, this cycle of films seems to me to be among the most interesting works and they are considered an essential step towards modern cinema. They did not have great public or critical success at the time, but over time several have come to be considered masterpieces. This is one of the least known, but it seems to me an extraordinary film. It is inevitable to interpret it in code and in relation with Rossellini relationship with Bergman. Something similar to what will happen later with Godard-Karina.

Often these works are films about a marital crisis surprisingly resolved in a final reconciliation, and centered on the female character. Ingrid Bergman left us here some of her most beautiful, authentic and natural interpretations.

It is not very clear which side the viewer should take (and hence, for example, the two contradictory endings). Rossellini uses two scenes as a metaphor for the general content of the film, but these two metaphors are very different and even almost contrary.

On the one hand we have the scene of the father who tries to convince his daughter to confess an obvious lie. The girl has stolen her brother's toy shotgun but is unable to recognize it to her parents. And this is one of the central themes of the film, the inability to recognize a deception or a betrayal, especially to loved ones. But on the other hand, the father is not only inflexible, but also authoritarian and cruel: it is he who decides that the girl cannot receive the gift she wants, the shotgun, and she has to enjoy the gift that her father chooses for her, the stuffed animal. . Those are the rules of the game that the girl must accept. Her rebellion against these rules leads her to betray her family's trust, and the girl must accept the rules and admit her fault.

On the other hand we have the scenes of the laboratory: this Mr. Wagner, a pharmacist with a Nazi past (which is still creepy), who has recently returned from a concentration camp and finds himself in a prosperous Germany, very different from the one he met a few years earlier, who is certainly envious of his wife's role as responsible for the family's economic well-being, analyzes the behavior of rabbits experimenting with gradually increasing doses of poison, observing the response, how they assimilate the growing tension, until lead them to death by heart attack or to recovery after administering a saving antidote at the last moment.

These two scenes reproduce two fundamental themes of the plot.

The film revolves around the Wagner marriage and begins with the unfaithful Mrs. Wagner breaking up with her lover. Rossellini does not show us the love relationship between the two, only how they have broken up. The lover hardly has an important role in the film and does not participate in any dilemma of the protagonist who, after all, from the beginning is repentant and clearly in love with her husband. What has led her to betray her beloved husband is a mystery, or at least it is not an important part of the film. Nor is it clear how he can love Mr. Wagner, who, as we will see, is a dark and irritating character.

Mrs. Wagner's problem comes when her ex-lover's old girlfriend blackmails her into telling her husband the truth if she doesn't give her large amounts of money. The husband finds the wife nervous and worried, hiding suspicious behavior or denying the evidence.

We soon suspect that the husband is fully aware of what the woman is going through, that he knows the story, that he has even hired the blackmailer, that he deep down does not stop trying to do with the wife what he did with the girl: force her to confess her betrayal. At the same time, he treats his wife much like the rabbits in his experiments, administering ever-increasing doses of stress, pushing her to the limit to force a desired behavior, and at the last moment either letting her die or administering an antidote (the final reconciliation). ).

Mrs. Wagner ends up discovering her husband's machinations, but this surprisingly does not diminish their love, but rather increases her feelings of guilt and shame, which leads her to the brink of suicide.

The final scene, in its international version, is the reconciliation of husband and wife, in which each asks for forgiveness. In the Italian version, the woman does not forgive her husband's behavior and flees with her children. The two endings are unrealistic, but the second is completely out of place and far from the theme of the film.

We can't help but think that Rossellini has put a lot of his relationship with Bergman into the film, has dished out blame, dishonestly (Rossellini is the one who betrays Bergman a couple of years later), but is clearly desperate for an impossible reconciliation. It is this ending similar to that of Viaggio in Italia: he desperately hopes for a final reconciliation in the name of a love that all the cruelty, resentment, jealousy, betrayal, contempt that we have seen during the film, have not been able to annul. .

Bergman is extraordinary and beautiful, although the script does not allow her to be very convincing as a successful business woman, it is something that we have to believe without much evidence. But in general, far from the sometimes dolled-up image that was forced on her in Hollywood, lit in a much less artificial way, the actress gains in naturalness and humanity and is absolutely moving. Only sometimes Rossellini wants to narrate too much with her face, and forces her to go through too many consecutive emotions, making it seem as if she is responding to a contrived playbill.

As so many times with Rossellini, the film is uneven. Rossellini said he could do a film just for one specific scene.

There are beautiful scenes like Bergman's wandering between the cells of the laboratory rabbits. One remembers that other wonderful scene of the child who wanders through the ruins of Berlin before throwing himself into the void.

You have to see the English version of 81 minutes, avoid the Italian version that cuts the scenes, gives them an explanatory voiceover and includes an unsatisfactory ending.

Pros: 1. The score is great and it helps to lather the film in an incessant ominous and tense atmosphere.

2. Ingrid Bergman (Irene Wagner) delivers a brilliant performance.

3. The cinematography is fantastic and uses the lighting to good dramatic effect, as well as showing off some really unique shots.

Cons: 1. The dubbing is insanely bad and thus distracting.

2. The dialogue is incredibly stale and formulaic, as well as being used to espouse blunt exposition.

3. There is some forced drama. For example, when the toy rifle is stolen, and then lied about, just so the movie could remind the audience that Irene Wagner was lying about her infidelity.

4. Some of the scenes are needlessly prolonged.

5. There are quite a few distractingly weak side performances.

6. The ending is utterly terrible as Professor Albert Wagner (Mathias Wieman) just forgives his wife's unfaithfulness just because he found out she knew he was blackmailing her because of her infidelity. Apparently her cheating is now irrelevant.