NEVER FEAR (1950)

We see Guy and Carol, a dance duo at the beginning of a promising career, in a nightclub doing a fencing number. The next day on the beach, Guy (Keefe Brasselle) proposes to Carol (Sally Forrest) who happily accepts. But at their next rehearsal, she gets dizzy and feverish and collapses, and is eventually diagnosed with polio. Unable to walk, she is taken to a rehabilitation center where her prognosis is unclear. She encourages Guy to find a new partner but instead he becomes a real estate agent and says he’ll wait for her. In the center, Carol is bitter and impatient with herself and others, and swats away the attentions of the handsome, wheelchair-bound Len (Hugh O’Brien). However, as she begins to make progress, she warms to him. Then Guy visits, still waiting for her, though now she swats him away by screaming, “I’m a cripple!” which brings contemptuous looks from the able-bodied partner of other patients. At her 21st birthday party, Guy breaks the news that he has found a new dance partner and is about to go on tour. Suddenly Len seems a lot more attractive, but is he still interested? This medical melodrama, a genre that was big in the 1950, gets points for mostly downplaying the drama and adopting a quasi-documentary style—much of it was filmed at the Kabat-Kaiser Institute in Santa Monica with real patients as extras, including a fascinating wheelchair square dance. But what isn’t downplayed is Carol’s self-pitying attitude, which I’m sure is realistic but which also bogs the middle of the film down. Sally Forrest got good notices for her performance, but she was unable to parlay that into a solid film career and left the screen in 1956 although she appeared in a few TV parts later. For what it’s worth, her movements make the character’s disability seem real. Brasselle, another marginal 50s name, is fine as is O’Brien. This is Ida Lupino's first credit as a director; she'd been acting in movies since the 1930s and continued to do so into the 1970s. Her touch here is impersonal with little manifested in the way of style or strong storytelling, though she went to make the tense little thriller THE HITCH-HIKER and forged a strong career as a television director. Pictured are Forrest and Brasselle. [TCM]