Fear (1946 film)
1946 film directed by Alfred Zeisler
Fear is a 1946 American low-budget film noir directed by Alfred Zeisler and produced by Monogram Pictures. The film loosely follows the main plot of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 1866 novel Crime and Punishment, without attribution.
Plot
Larry Crain (Peter Cookson), a medical student on a scholarship, learns that all student scholarships, including his, have been cancelled by his school. Desperately short of cash and overdue on paying his rent, Crain goes to the apartment of Professor Stanley (Francis Pierlot), a teacher who has a sideline as a pawnbroker, though Crain is already in debt to him too. Crain pawns his father's watch for a small amount of money, but notes details in the professor's apartment, including the strong box and wall safe where he keeps his money and a heavy fireplace poker.
A bit later at a diner, Crain meets a young woman (Anne Gwynne) who doesn't have cash to pay for her coffee. Crain covers her bill, and she promises to pay him back. However, when Crain receives a tuition bill from the school and an ultimatum from his landlady, he returns to the professor's apartment. Managing to be admitted by the professor without anyone else seeing him, including a painter at work in a room, Crain presents a tightly-wrapped object that he claims to be a cigarette case he'd like to pawn. While the professor struggles to unwrap the package and comes to realize that it is only a glass ashtray, Crain grabs a poker with his gloved hands and strikes the professor dead.
The public source identifies “Fear (1946 film)” as 1946 film directed by Alfred Zeisler. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Fear, film and directed.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2656034. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1946 and 1866.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fear (1946 film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.