“There was an absolute and ironclad caste system in the film capital in the 1940s and 1950s,” Ida Lupino once wrote, that “had its primary purpose to exclude females.”
A Hollywood star who had a fascinating run as an independent filmmaker, Lupino bucked that system and, in doing so, took control of her life in moves. In 1949, she began production on “Never Fear,” her official directorial debut. She had already quietly taken over a film, “Not Wanted,” when its original director fell ill. But “Never Fear” — the story of a young dancer felled by polio — was Lupino’s coming-out as a director.
It was also the first title made under the banner of the Filmakers, the company that Lupino formed with her husband, Collier Young, and writer Malvin Wald (“The Naked City”). Unsatisfied with the roles she had been offered, Lupino turned to making movies, saying it gave her “the freedom to call my own shots.” Her company had financial growing pains, though, and “Never Fear” (later retitled “The Young Lovers”) may not have opened in New York (which is why I’m reviewing it now). On Friday, a terrific restoration will screen as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s annual To Save and Project festival of film preservation.
“Never Fear” takes off just as dance partners Carol (Sally Forrest, a Lupino discovery) and Guy (Keefe Brasselle) are about to debut their latest routine at a Los Angeles-area supper club. Their inaugural number, a cornily amusing romantic duet-duel with clattering swords, proves that they have what the audience wants. Not long after, Carol falls ill — soon she can’t walk unassisted — and learns she has polio. Her father (Herbert Butterfield) secures her a private room in a rehabilitation center, where much of the story takes place. There, Carol struggles physically and psychologically, pushing and pulling at Guy and endangering their future dreams.
Written by Lupino and Young, “Never Fear” is a tough-minded, modest, yet memorable film about a profound existential struggle. The arc of its rehabilitation narrative is largely familiar; it was released amid a clutch of movies about disabled veterans like “The Men” (1950), Marlon Brando’s big-screen debut. For inspiration, Lupino drew on a physiotherapist she had known at the real rehab center where the movie was set, the Kabat-Kaiser Institute in Santa Monica, California. She also probably borrowed from her life, having contracted polio when she was 16 and under contract at Paramount. (Because of a set accident during “Never Fear,” she directed from a wheelchair.)
“Never Fear” has an attractive no-frills look that fits the story and its modesty, and is in keeping with Lupino’s embrace of documentary realism. Working with a cast that includes actual patients and largely avoiding glamour (except in the hair and makeup), she whittles the story down to basics and mainly focuses on the rehabilitation and Carol’s emotions. Although never less than sympathetic, Carol isn’t picture-perfect; she doesn’t suffer beautifully or pacifically. She frets and fights, and lashes out at Guy and often at herself. She also starts a needy flirtation with another patient, Len (a suave Hugh O’Brian in the film’s strongest performance), whom she clings to as her worries about her progress escalate.
Much of “Never Fear” unfolds indoors, which gives it a claustrophobic quality that dovetails with Carol’s sense of feeling trapped, and comes out in jolts of anger, panic and self-pity. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Lupino, a tough number — and a memorable, complicated presence in noirs like “High Sierra” — has little patience for Carol’s despair. The movie’s attitude toward its protagonist is fiercely devoid of sentimentalism and, at times, flat-out disapproving. In one bracing scene, Carol, now in a wheelchair, shrieks “I’m a cripple!” at Guy, an explosion that provokes a withering rebuke from two lovers, one a man on crutches who firmly puts that self-pity in its place.
Forrest and Brasselle are never quite as good as you want them to be, though both have their moments, especially when their characters are most tightly wound. (From some angles and in certain lights, Forrest can resemble Lupino, who cast her in other films.) Some of the more haunting performances happen around the edges: The look of contempt that the woman with the man on crutches gives Carol resonates long after the scene has ended, deepening the story’s emotional colors. And an aching sequence with Guy and another woman, a would-be fling (a touching Eve Miller), condenses a movie’s worth of adult desire and regret into the melancholy that settles in her face.
“Never Fear” is sprinkled with scenes shot outdoors that deepen its textured realism, including a picnic for the patients, their friends and others. (While Lupino was directing her first film, she admiringly spoke about neorealist god Roberto Rossellini.) Here, as elsewhere, Lupino underscores the ordinariness of these men and women, some of whom are in wheelchairs while others relax next to them. She matter-of-factly conveys disability in intimate moments of rehabilitation — in close-ups of Carol’s body moving and being coaxed to move — and when she goes big and wide for an exuberant square dance in which the revelers do-si-do in wheelchairs, joyously independent.
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‘Never Fear’ (‘The Young Lovers’)
Not rated. In English and Spanish, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.