Fear

Based on a novella by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (whose work was also the basis for Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman), Fear was Roberto Rossellini’s last collaboration with his then wife Ingrid Bergman. Both the extramarital affair between Bergman and Rossellini prior to their marriage and the fragile state of their union at the time of filming cast shadows over the plot, which involves a married woman (Bergman) anguished over her own infidelity and blackmailed by her husband’s former lover. Fear was shot in Munich, and its bleak assessment of postwar West German society harks back to Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero.