by Jo Rempel, Contributor

The third act of Ida Lupino’s Never Fear (1950) commences with the slow walk towards heterosexuality. After a sudden attack of polio, young dancer Carol Williams (Sally Forrest) is convinced that she’ll never be able to walk again. She has cut her choreographer boyfriend, Guy (Keefe Brasselle) off, convinced that they’re incompatible now that she has reduced mobility. Their last conversation had Guy at loose ends, shouting “I don’t care what you want anymore. Carol—Carol, be a woman for me!” Previously, he has taken advantage of her wheelchair to whisk her away whether she wants to or not; they are alone together because he got the doctor to prescribe her an open-air drive: what’s new is that he’s verbalizing what’s self-evident. Guy’s last sentence seems to return to Carol with new force when she talks to her fellow patient Josie (Rita Lupino), who married her husband after polio hit her. “It was Mac’s idea,” she says, taking a wistful drag as Carol brushes her hair. “Said it would keep him on the straight and narrow. Give him something to work for.”

This is what gets Carol to resume physiotherapy in full force. She has no guarantees of a career, but she will at least have a husband. The training montage would be a feat of disorientation—she moves from facing left to right, lying down to in the pool, framed in close-up to wide—were the viewer’s eyeline not kept on her feet, making a clean pirouette out of incremental work. Her true destination, the man who tells her feet how to move, is absent for the time being. Nonetheless, she moves.

I hate to play into the bygone pop-feminist notion that “The Bechdel Test” was a rigorous measure of whether or not a film is feminist, but in the case of Never Fear it’s pretty visceral. Josie is Carol’s most stable companion throughout her stay, and the one conversation that we see between the two of them is about the men in their lives. Playing towards domestic melodrama depletes the film’s sense of documentary.

This is not to say that it loses its sense of reality. The power of melodrama lies in treating the irrational, inarticulable pain of emotional dynamics as real—even the only thing that matters. True independence is thrown out the window as an option for Carol; the melodramatic mode reveals it to be little more than a false front.

When Lupino went into producing with then-husband Collier Young, it was out of a yearning for truth. Or, in a less poetic sense, it was out of being fed up with acting, and the studio system as a whole. Just before joining up with Anson Bond’s Emerald Productions, soon to be known as The Filmakers, Inc., Lupino crossed paths with Roberto Rosselini at a party, whose complaints came to her as a call to action: “In Hollywood movies, the star is crazy, or he drinks too much, or he wants to kill his wife. When are you going to make pictures about ordinary people, in ordinary situations?” This meant always approaching film from the sociological angle first, always looking for an unseen issue with a populist angle. As Young was quoted in the New York Times, “We’re working on the theory that the ticket-buying public is more interested in what’s in a picture than who’s in it.” On the poster for Not Wanted, the story of a drifting unwed mother, the tagline buttresses Sally Forrest’s bulging figure: “her story—the nation’s problem!”

Lupino’s second impetus came from Jack Gregory, a renowned physiotherapist who had overseen her recovery from a bout with polio in 1934. The disease came hand in hand with her life’s turning point; it struck her right after moving from England to Hollywood at the behest of Paramount, at the age of 15. Now in her thirties, Lupino hoped to step out of the spotlight and make room for a new generation of actors. A new polio epidemic was raging on the heels of the Second World War’s end. Tapping into what was an uneasy crossroads for the generation ahead of her, she worked non-stop on the script for Never Fear.

When trying to raise additional funds, Young was warned—as the flipside to the theory he posed to the NYT—that nobody would want to see a movie about Polio. Most theatres would indeed refuse to book screenings. When asked by Young about Never Fear’s chances with audiences, a theatre owner claimed the disease was too close to home for a general audience. While violence had a strong demographic, the pain of “the soldiers and criminals remains somewhere in the distance, but polio can take you and your family. It’s a very personal thing.” Many of those theatres that did choose to screen Never Fear did so with a different name on the marquee: The Young Lovers. It didn’t help in drawing viewership. In fact, youth evokes something guaranteed to affect everyone—the need to enter maturity. Youth cannot be clung to forever, no matter how unbearable the world might be. The wheelchair-using cartoonist Len (Hugh O’Brian) is one of many paternalistic men in Carol’s life urging her to find her willpower, but his case is a tragedy of its own. Unlike Carol, whether he can walk or not has nothing to do with his own effort; he lives in limbo, deprived of melodrama. He spends every night projecting his situation by telling the ward’s children stories of the Fleap. As he explains to Carol, “he’s neither a flea nor a fly, and it drives him bats being nothing, so he sets out to prove to the world that someday he’ll be something.”

In this sense, Never Fear deals with the double bind that comes with being deprived of normal problems. Trailing ahead of Leith Stevens’ score, it is Forrest’s performance that drives the film’s melodrama. A dancer with no speaking roles prior to working with Filmakers, she holds her own in a conflict with Lupino’s visual style: as Ronnie Scheib points out in her seminal retrospective, after Carol’s delirious outbreak she is deprived of the close-up’s sensuality. “The camera only regains its intimacy to record her self-willed isolation”—as opposed to her initial isolation by the hand of fate.

The one scene that comes close to sensuality is a performance of it, as we see Carol and Guy put on a “duelling lovers” routine for a dinner crowd. At the same time, Lupino’s documentary approach is at its most obvious. Flashy steps remain unpunctuated, with cuts always occuring on a delay. Acute high and low angles tend to be shot in wide, and in deep focus; putting the audience at the vanishing point deflates any narrative tension. The dance does not—nor can it ever—be an isolated source of drama and closure. At most, the scene’s anti-kinetic approach lets it be an exotic mode of being in limbo with the world.

Those like Scorsese who have given Lupino her due as a director will often give credit to her “remarkable empathy for the tragic and heart-broken.” This point shouldn’t be taken at face value; she may have chosen underrepresented people to depict, but subjects don’t automatically translate into semantics. Consider the scene which follows after Carol collapses on her floor trying to walk on her own. A clay bust of a man and woman joined together is framed in medium, with Carol’s hand hovering at the edge of the frame. She strokes the man’s face, before stabbing at the woman until unrecognizable. As Carol collapses in anguish and her body enters the frame, the camera slowly pulls back to reveal Len, giving one of the kids the latest scoop on The Fleap. Carol is given the time and space to enact vengeance upon a fetish of herself, but we are never quite engaged with her. One could even think of our distance from her as uncaring. Her denigration of herself and the heterosexual couple’s validity is a futile catharsis. Not for a second are we made to believe that her emotional state reflects reality—that she will never walk, or that she and Guy are incompatible. Yet in avoiding a confined subjectivity, the dense mise-en-scène figures Carol as an artist among art, exerting whatever power she’s able to. Scheib describes Never Fear’s physiotherapy sequences as exhibiting in their strenuous precision “a very sexual but non-phantasmic sense of the woman’s body.” Likewise there is little room nor time here for the irrational. Still, as we move on from Carol we hold onto her, allowing her to grow leaky, letting her excess bleed into her surroundings.

Gregory had urged Lupino to make a story about hope. The film’s title is a gesture towards it, but its idiom is closer to “the show must go on.” Here, duty is a far more life-sustaining force than desire.

Empathy, in this sense, is a form of sublimation from the individual’s emotional deadlock to a sense of collectivity in movement—sometimes actual, sometimes facilitated by the camera. Contact may be fleeting, but synchronicity keeps things grounded. Never Fear features a second dance scene, a wheelchair square dance. Its treatment is remarkable in how it rhymes with the first: the same high/low angle mix, the same cuts showing Carol’s struggle to keep things in step. As the dancers roll two by two towards the camera before peeling away, one gets the sense that a world independant of the outside’s demands is realizable.

Such a goal is fantastical; it cannot be ignored that Never Fear’s patients remain under the US government’s auspices. The style of independence on display here is completely at odds with the American ideal of becoming a self-reliant holder of capital. The Americans with Disabilities Act would not be enacted until 1990, and state support is limited: the community fostered by the clinic is impermanent by necessity. If the passage into maturity is universal, disability problematizes it, revealing that one’s employer and government will continue as tenuous sources of reliance. As Marta Russell and Ravi Malhotra explain in “Capitalism and Disability,” “the ruling class would like to cut state spending on keeping disabled people out of work, but redistributionist laws like the ADA are necessarily in tension with business class interests, which resist such cost shifting.”

Remaining abled comes hand in hand with denial. Len tells Carol how he was coordinating railway deliveries when the polio symptoms hit him, how he kept trying to do his job as they set in and caused a misdelivered shipment in the process. His employer is understanding enough to take him back—supposing he recovers fully. Polio may have been an equal-opportunity illness, but when one’s value is determined by their availability within the labour market, a loss of mobility is a loss of personhood. This is not a case of capability, but of whether one’s value can be extracted. “The disability category,” according to Russel and Malhotra, “remains indispensable as an instrument of the state in controlling the labour supply today. By focusing on curing so-called abnormalities, and segregating who could not be cured into the administrative category of ‘disabled’, medicine cooperated in shoving less exploitable working out of the mainstream workforce.”

Living as “hoofers” travelling from city to city, gig to gig, Carol and Guy are far from embodying the mainstream workforce. While Guy remains on his feet, he can’t carry on this way—not without Carol, at least. He ends up bungling his way into a job hocking mortgages for Happy Homes, Inc. It’s a little on the nose, to say the least. Lupino seemed to be fond of her men who play house: Keefe Brasselle the model train obsessive in Not Wanted (1949), Edmond O’Brien the freezer salesman juggling two nuclear families in The Bigamist (1953). These portable lives express a continuing reticence towards stability. Everyone is ready to pack up and go, leak throughout America’s breadth.

Indeed, the second time we see Guy at the Happy Homes offices, he’s already cleared out his things. He enacts the fantasy the job could’ve actualized while he can: lounging in his boss’s chair, a glass of liquor sitting in the center of the frame, in front of a model home. The company secretary (Eve Miller) hangs around the desk before asking him for a ride. A tryst with Phyllis is yet another job that Guy wasn’t built for; he ends up asleep on her couch instead.
Lupino had made her desire to direct public as early as 1945, but she only went behind the camera for Never Fear because it was contingent on securing private backers. She had previously taken up the reins of Not Wanted (1949) after veteran journeyman Elmer Clifton suffered a heart attack on the third day of shooting—ostensibly because Filmakers couldn’t afford to hire a substitute. Wheeler Winston Dixon casts doubt on this claim, seeing there certainly were cheap directors available at the time. Whether Lupino was aware of them or not is besides the point: what’s clear is that she was shifting the narrative away from her own desire to direct. A press team would arrive on set to see Clifton in his chair, with Lupino managing the set. She could explain the intent of every scene and knew how to get it out of the cast and crew—all of which would turn out to be a preface to the fact that she was not directing the movie.

When her status as director was official, Lupino’s image became even more heavily curated: so meticulous was her feminine non-imposition that the back of her chair read “Mother of Us All,” as the legend goes. She was quite public that this was a necessary front for her to put up in order to be taken seriously, but the admission was likely a front itself. On record, she had stated that “Often I pretended to a cameraman to know less than I did. That way I got more cooperation.” On the other hand, Archie Stout, who shot Never Fear, and had previously worked for John Ford, would state that she had “more knowledge of camera angles and lenses than any director I’ve worked with, with the exception of Victor Fleming. She knows how a woman looks on screen, and what light that woman should have, probably better than I do.” As late as 1974, she was putting forth a narrative that she was constantly unsure of herself: “I’d run to the phone again, but this time [editor William Ziegler would] say: ‘Uh-uh, you’re on your own.’”

As Carol celebrates her 21st birthday, she stands up proud and beaming over her cake. A wide shot caked in shadow like no other in the film, this is Never Fear at its most dreamlike. Yet, soon enough, she’s pinched by Guy, who tells her he’s finally gone on his own and taken a choreography gig in Las Vegas. When confronted by Len, Carol collapses, praying for the same codependency she had before, shouting “Tell me I’m a woman! Tell me I’m not a failure!” I’ve played the scene over a dozen times by now for research purposes—more to see that it still breaks my heart than anything else.

Was the Ziegler story really true? Was Lupino a feminist, or wasn’t she? The trail of retrospectives following Scheib are also a minefield of revisionism. I doubt that the truth really matters in this case. If Never Fear prioritizes a white, heterosexual, non-disabled passing womanhood, this makes it all the more feminist: the movement’s early-20th century allegiance to eugenics mustn’t remain a footnote. The political and medical separation of womanhood from disability—and this extends to later gains in gay and trans politics—was a roadblock to solidarity, no matter what practical gains it entailed. Despite maintaining the distinction, Never Fear shows it as fragile. No matter how regressive she may or may not have been politically, Lupino told stories of deep fissures in the heart of America, of people like her who told stories of dependance to survive. Guy returns to Carol as she exits the institution, but they are merely supplanting an unknown risk for a known one. Lupino herself wasn’t so lucky: a deal with Howard Hughes’s RKO following Not Wanted’s success ended up bankrupting The Filmakers by 1953, having been obligated to pay out of pocket on the marketing end. It’s hard to call it a tragedy. Like Never Fear’s square dance, her career comes off as a miracle of form, a brief flicker of joy against all odds.