"Fragment of Fear" certainly isn't your average type of whodunit/mystery thriller, and whether or not you like it will entirely depend on your own personal attention span and tolerance towards screenplays that reveal very few clues and depict only a minimum amount of action. Who killed Lucy Dawson, the elderly aunt of recovering drug-addict turned novelist Tim Brett, whilst she was on vacation in Italy and seemingly visiting the ruins nearby Pompeii? More importantly, are we really supposed to care by whom Aunt Lucy got strangled and why, because the script (adapted from John Bingham's novel) remains distant and vague regarding the actual murder and clearly only wants us to worry about the deteriorating mental state of protagonist Tim Brett. Shortly after the murder, and having fallen in love with the witness who first discovered the body, Tim returns to London and decides to investigate the murder himself. Although he discovers almost nothing, he does receive a few unmistakably clear warnings to restrain from looking further. He is repeatedly visited by a peculiar old lady (who turns up dead later), gets threatening letters coming from his own typewriter and someone is laughing mysteriously on his answering machine. The police don't take him very seriously, being a former heroine junkie, and rather than killing him as well, the person (or persons) Tim Brett tries to unmask is merely attempting to bring his persona in further discredit. Yes, I do realize this brief description is rather confusing, but so is the entire film! I'm not even sure if I understood half of it! "Fragment of Fear" is definitely one of the best films ever made in terms of depicting the paranoiac state of its lead character! Throughout the entire film everybody is wondering whether or not everything that is happening is real or not; and even the denouement doesn't provide a conclusive answer. Like Tim Brett mumbles at one point during the film: "Either I am mad and all this isn't happening to me, or else I'm sane and it is…" There you go: "Fragment of Fear" accurately summarized in one single line of text. Paranoid or not, the film does contain a couple of remarkably suspenseful moments, a marvelous illustration of London society during the late 60s/early 70s, a catchy soundtrack and a number of solid acting performances. David Hemmings remains one of the most phenomenal but sadly underrated actors of his generation. He carries the entire film, which must have been quite a heavy burden, without a lot of effort. There are many truly gifted actors and actresses in the supportive cast, like Adolfo Celi, Flora Robson and Yootha Joyce, but their screen time is bizarrely limited.

A movie with Hemmings, Gayle Hunnicutt, Adolfo Celi (a serviceable supporting player), W. H. White, about insanity, severe delusions, grief, very accomplished unpretentious craftsmanship, it's not artsy, but stylish, lavish, colorful; the style is a European synthesis, not only British, but continental as well ….Very suspenseful, one of the most accomplished genre movies, of an ineffable freshness; the sense of creepiness is as efficient as nuanced and sober. It has an undertone of distorted sexuality, the predilection for aged women, Bunface and the schoolgirls, the eerie but certain appeal of the aged ladies, those kisses; the focus is on eyes, mouths, thighs in their shameless bare luxuriance. Tim Brett's flat gives a very suggestive sense of the place.The young women appear as naked thighs, and so does the seductress in the train, the temptress who knows the writer's address. Also, the leading character's 1st shot shows his legs.Those thighs symbolize the access, not as much denied (by the women), as repellent. He feels threatened by the walk, by the bride's walk …. The male characters, beginning with the copper who visits him, are paternal symbols. They are burly. The women's thighs are viscous. The women are cold, tempting, indifferent, desired. The writer resents them. Force, desire, dream, deceit; he feels deceived, and resents health, the insanity proves a stronger temptation than the drugs he used to take.In its depiction of the insanity, the movie shows the feverish phony cleverness of the delusion, with its crippling mistrust; and it's not a moralizing stance, but a clinical one, the twilight of a mind, clinically depicted. The addiction is a _crippleness, and the leading character ends in a wheelchair, i. e. denying himself almost everything, deprived of walk and deprived of rest, unable to walk, unable to rest, dominated by his wife, defeated. The puzzling plot has been meant to be dreamlike. The eerie, spooky story-line from the standpoint of insanity had a worthy career in the cinema, and occasioned other movies as well.Both leads give apposite performances. It's impressive how both of them understood the requirements of their roles.Gayle Hunnicutt is decorative, and her role required a bland act, she had to be a decorative doll. Hemmings made me think of a plumper and more urbane Dean; what might seem like overacting actually suits his part, suggesting the behavior of a psychotic, the feverish, sometimes frenzied behavior.

This British - very British - thriller trades on the good name of David Hemmings, who at this time still had substantial "Blow Up" cachet left to p*ss away. His jaded ex-junkie finds his aunt murdered one sunny vacation, and sets out to find out whodunit amid many threatening overtures from big nasties. The main selling point here is a wild and wholly inappropriate soundtrack from one Johnny Harris - Hemmings is just shlepping around the funeral doing nothing in particular, and in comes that damned 'screaming flute' with attendant bongos. It's not embarrassingly bad, but it is dull for long stretches of dialogue in between its set pieces, and for all its attempts to be tense and/or creepy the plot's passing resemblance to Argento's "Deep Red" (also with Hemmings) does this no favours at all.

Richard Sarafian is a decidedly underrated director. After finally seeing this, it's satisfying to report his VANISHING POINT was not a flash-in-the-pan. FRAGMENT...does not move at the same pace, nor does it get the viewer involved quite as quickly, but once you're about twenty minutes in, you're hooked until the end as Sarafian and screenwriter Dehn continually manipulate reality and our perceptions of it, along with lead character David Hemmings' perceptions of it. Really brilliant in the way it portrays a matter-of-fact unfolding of events that seem like a conventional, yet still insidious conspired-murder-by-blackmail-ring plot. But then we're constantly shown by the dialogue and actions of other characters that these events we've just witnessed may never have occurred. As an audience, we're constantly being shifted back and forth, momentarily convinced that recovering-addict-turned-successful-writer Hemmings is undergoing paranoid delusions, then the next moment convinced there really is a vast conspiracy against him and his investigation into his rich aunt's death. Disturbing and constantly involving, sucking the viewer in until the shocking conclusion. Unfortunately, the film's one real liability, which may in fact be the reason for some viewers' antipathy toward this film, is its totally inappropriate music score. Not only is the score mixed too loud on the soundtrack, it repeatedly draws attention to itself, often diffusing the effects Sarafian is trying to achieve. If only they had gotten someone like John Dankworth who could have composed a similar jazzy score but much more subtly and in keeping with the film's rhythms. Of course, even better would have been Ennio Morricone, someone who had already scored many Italian giallo thrillers that had attempted to play with reality in a similar way. Whomever hired Johnny Harris made a big mistake. His score is the one thing that keeps this from being a genuine little masterpiece.