Fear Is the Key (1973)

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Watching Fear Is the Key is almost exactly like reading Alistair MacLean's adventure novel on which the movie is based. Or any of MacLean's adventure novels, for that matter. The action is fast, furious and often incomprehensible. The plot roars straight ahead without a care for plausibility, coincidence or loose ends. Women are scarce and irrelevant. The hero can do anything. MacLean had one great strength, and it's a strength a lot of adventure writers would kill for. He knew how to set up a plot that would capture a reader straight off, and then never let the tempo slow down, always building one readable action sequence after another, however improbable. Fear Is the Key was one of his earlier novels. It holds up as a good action read to finish in a day or two. The movie is not as good. Novels let us create our own mind images of the action and the ambiance. (Louisiana bayous and tidal swamps are great places to imagine.) Fear Is the Key, the movie, has a lot of action. But since there's no room for our own images in a movie, we're stuck with seeing exactly what the talents of the director, the faces of the actors and the pictures from the cinematographer force us see. It's harder to ignore improbabilities. The opening, like so many of MacLean's books, has great hooks. We watch and listen to a man on a short-wave radio talk to the pilot of a small cargo plane flying somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico. We hear the man on the ground talk to a young woman on the plane. Then suddenly the plane's pilot yells that an aircraft is firing on them. We hear bullet strikes, screams, the long dive and the crash into the ocean. We don't know what's going on but by now we're interested. Three years later we meet the man again. John Talbot (Barry Newman), grim and surly, is driving down the Louisiana coast looking for trouble. He finds it, slugging cops, insulting a judge, making a courtroom escape and shooting a court constable, taking a young woman hostage and then spending the next 15 minutes or so on one of the longest car chases I've seen. With police in pursuit and his hostage wishing she were anywhere else, Talbot takes his stolen car screeching and swerving down city streets, across cane fields, smashing through roadblocks, roaring onto a ferry, clattering over wooden roads, and bouncing over potholes. It's kind of boring after awhile because it goes on for so long and -- key point here -- we have no idea what this tough guy's motivation could be. It's forty minutes before the outline of some reasonable motivation takes shape and 60 minutes before the point of the movie is reached. During this time I found it hard to stay interested despite all the violent action and creepy characters. The last forty minutes, however, when plot and motivation finally meet, turn out to be satisfyingly brutal and filled to the brim with revenge. Along the way, in addition to Newman, we meet a puzzling big business natural gas owner played by Ray McAnally; his daughter (the hostage) played by Suzy Kendall; a smoothie crook played by John Vernon; a possibly corrupt cop played by Dolph Sweet (in a fine performance) and a cool hit man with a nearly full head of dark hair played by a young Ben Kingsley. Except for Kendall, a looker but no actress who has an irritating voice that sounds like a little girl was combined with a munchkin, they all do fine jobs. Newman, who played tough guy heroes in a number of movies during this time, is grim and capable to a fault. His character becomes understandable only in the last five minutes. Newman has to play him as he's written...and Talbot is written to be an ace driver, skilled scuba diver, knowledgeable explorer of an off-shore oil rig, superb pilot and engineer for an undersea submersible, dominant with his fists and his feet, perfection when it comes to crashing through French doors and always ready with an ironic comeback. In other words, he's one of MacLean's typically over-achieving, unbeatable heroes, and completely unbelievable. In my opinion, Barry Newman was a fine actor when he wasn't called upon to be this kind of Hollywood hero. It seems to me he has just gotten better as he has aged. He was terrific in The Limey. The movie, like Alistair MacLean's books, gives us action and more action, sketchy motivation and enough loose ends to make a big ball of yarn. Still, I thought the book was fun. The movie is fun for the first 10 minutes and the last 40 minutes.

This is one of my favourite movies of the 70's and in my opinion , very underrated. I certainly think it has the best car chase , ie; when the car is dented , it remains so in the next shot , not back to showroom condition ! ( the one in Bullitt is perhaps the coolest , but how many times does McQueen pass that green Beetle ! ) along with the great Roy Budd soundtrack. Barry Newman is great in the lead role , and although the plot is a bit far-fetched in places, it is great entertainment and has a good twist at the end , but I do think the underwater scenes looked a bit like the bottom of a goldfish pond ! One of those great movies nobody has heard of ! This is available on DVD in Scandinavian countries so grab a copy.

I like Alistair MacLean's books, so I approached this film with a sense of dread. Could it be another MacLean book ruined on the big screen, like Bear Island, Caravan to Vaccares or River of Death? Fortunately, this is perhaps the best of all the MacLean's film adaptations. It begins with the most extraordinary car chase imaginable (far better than the much touted one in The French Connection) and never relaxes from that point on. To reveal much of the plot would be a spoiler, but suffice to say that the hero spends most of the film acting as the bad guy, trying to confuse some crooks that he's on their side so that he can get into their organisation and carry out his terrible revenge plan. Barry Newman is terrific as the hero, in a role similar to his Vanishing Point character. John Vernon is a mean villain, too, and Dolph Sweet has a short but pivotal role as a friendly insider. It's impossible to guess what will happen next, but the final scene brings everything together brilliantly, and leaves you quite literally gasping for air. See this soon!!

FEAR IS THE KEY is one real gem of a B-movie. The plot is packed with twists from beginning to end, and the characters are not always what they seem. Good performances from everyone involved, though no big stars. Clint Eastwood's best and favorite nemesis, John Vernon(JOSEY WALES; THE UNCANNY) appears here as the archvillain, supported by an early hairy Ben Kingsley. This film is no less than a little masterpiece, with a strong though unpredictable story, and an energetic soundtrack courtesy of GET CARTER's Roy Budd. In the vein of THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS and Mario Bava's CANI ARRABBIATI. It's a man's world.