TV : Western : DVD quality : English
Fearful Courage, with Ida Lupino and James Whitmore, is a remarkably tense, morally complex little thriller that finds Lupino, running from a hired gun whose job it is to run off a group of homesteaders, implicating stranger Whitmore in her escape. Lupino, whose husband was just murdered, finds Whitmore's cabin and implores him to help - something he doesn't want to do at first. But once he hears the matter-of-fact evilness of the gunfighter, he can't not help Lupino, even though he's mad at her for drawing him into a fight he never wanted. Even better, in the script by Arthur Ross, Whitmore soon implicates his own innocent - a passerby whom he uses to try and scare off the gunslinger - who is quickly dispatched by the killer. Whitmore is now just as guilty as Lupino in making his own problems, someone else's. Directed with real suspense by Bernard Girard (there's a terrific visual motif of the couple watching the light under the cabin door, fearfully waiting for it to wane, before the killer's nighttime assault), Fearful Courage is one of the best little half-hour "B" programmers you never saw at the movie theatre.
