A Reflection of Fear
Director: William A. Fraker Run Time: 89 min. Format: 35mm Rating: PG Release Year: 1972
Starring: Sondra Locke, Robert Shaw, Sally Kellerman, Mary Ure, Mitch Ryan, Leonard John Crofoot
Join The Deuce in June as together we part the curtains of concealment and – orb-glazed – aghast agape agog! – gaze unflinchingly upon the naked face of Fatherly failure… of patriarchal pretensions pummeled to paralyzing perplexion… too transfixed to glance away… try not! For there is no shielding your eyes from A REFLECTION OF FEAR!! Together we shall drown – The Deuce and you… this June – in a deliriously dreamlike descent to the depths of a daughter’s undying love for her dear daddy… that may well be as deadly as it is undying!!??!!
Admittedly attractively “manly” (being Robert Shaw after all) yet dud of a deadbeat gone-for-long dad – in need of divorce to remarry (Sally Kellerman!) – drops by the sprawling mansion of Matriarchy in which the women he’d abandoned reside… namely his still wed-to wife, her mother, and, most notably, his now 16-yr-old timidly taciturn, doll-doting, microbe-magnifying dweeby daughter (an already 20-something pre-Eastwood’d Sondra Locke!!) – direly disrupting the delicate balance already barely held and dovetailing said dweeby daughter into a desirous delirium for said sad-sack yet strangely sexy dad whose freaked-out fiancée fears the feeling may be more than a tad too mutual!! And… amidst this miasma of madness… a masked murderer roams about the grounds… doing murdering!!
Famously fantastic filmer Fraker’s sole directorial foray into horror, for which he corralled fellow lensman legend Laslo Kovacs to handle shooting duties – the camera-cranking couple together creating a go-for-baroque Grand Guignol of gauzy Gothic ghoulishness that eschews blood and gore for more subtle and genuinely unsettling spine shivers… For which, in an uncannily coincidental – albeit probably unconscious bit of double-billing bravado by the Brandt Theater honchos – hawking “The Height Of Horror!” to their Selwyn (and down the 42nd Street block Apollo, the following fearsome week) patrons, teaming it with frigid train-bound fright-flick The Creeping Flesh – from yet another fellow cinematographer titan-turned-director (and back again camera-helming a handsome heap of David Lynch features) Freddie Francis (“who made your flesh crawl with Tales From The Crypt!,” touted the ads) – for some promised “Shock!” and “Suspense!” that’s sure to have you Deuce-Daddies doo-dooing in your drawers! Leave it to The Deuce to hold a mirror to your mores – for you to see A REFLECTION OF FEAR!!