» Genre Films

If Dorothy Arzner (DANCE, GIRL, DANCE, 1940) has been historically most well known as a director of Hollywood films (from the late 1920s to the early 1940s), Ida Lupino predominated as the most renown woman director from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s (albeit primarily through films that she herself independently produced). Lupino was the second woman director (after Arzner) to be admitted to the Director’s Guild of America.

Ida Lupino made a unique mark of filmmaking of the era by focusing on social issue films, that dramatically brought to the fore such taboo subjects as serial killers (THE HITCH-HIKER) bigamy (THE BIGAMIST), rape (OUTRAGE) out-of-wedlock birth (NOT WANTED), and polio (NEVER FEAR).

In NEVER FEAR, Carol Williams (Sally Forrest, who also starred in Lupino’s NOT WANTED) is a beautiful young dancer whose body, and promising career, is suddenly crippled by polio. Carol’s dance partner and fiancé, Guy Richards (played by Keefe Brasselle, a featured actor in A PLACE IN THE SUN, 1951), wants to see her through her illness, but the angry, self-pitying Carol prefers to go it alone. Her father takes her to the Kabat-Kaiser Institute for rehabilitation, where she meets fellow patients like Len Randall on her tough road to recovery.

Ida Lupino, who herself had been stricken with polio as an adolescent, creates in NEVER FEAR is a psychologically probing look at coping with chronic illness. The film was co-written and co-produced by Lupino and her partner (and husband) Collier Young. The movie is filmed in semi-documentary style and shot in black-and-white by Archie Stout, an ongoing collaborator on Lupino’s fllms.  The crisp cinematography is highlighted as seen in this new 2K Restoration.  This digital edition also includes an audio commentary track by film historian Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.

"As written by Ida Lupino and Collier Young, the screenplay was psychologically sound in dealing with the emotional ups and downs of polio victims, and it is equally convincing as a documentary of treatment with effective shots of physical therapy".

- Variety

Also by Ida Lupino

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