Redfern’s review published on Letterboxd:
The rare early Cold War era political thriller which hasn’t lost a single ounce of its timeliness, in fact it only seems to gain more in this day and age where statistical inference and machine learning/processing has become almost an ideology in itself. The Fearmakers really strikes at the heart of modern liberal politics, though, because it identifies how the manipulation of this data is essential to power and its acquisition—one of the first to do so—effecting the basis for all paranoiac notions surrounding our institutions and the people chosen to maintain them. It’s been a while since I’ve seen any of Tourneur’s non-Lewton work and I’m pleasantly surprised to see how he excels here around the edges of the story, that is through the small details which lend richness to his portraits of characters suffering with the same malignant anxiety, boiling into violence, that seemingly suffuses their society. As a red menace film this is entirely noncommittal, but its concern for ‘commies’ only ever belonged to the absolute control and conflation of power and authority which existed within Stalinism and, in a different form, through the technics the Pentagon and its ideologues/think-tanks were realising in the post-war period (cf. Lewis Mumford). Likely underrating.
Redfern liked this review
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