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Never Fear

by Lauren James on January 1, 2025

There are so many ways this polio drama could go wrong. Luckily, it has Ida Lupino.

It’s hard to go wrong ringing in the new year with Ida Lupino.

Lupino could direct agonizingly effective suspense, and her adeptness with tension—and her embrace of one of its key dramatic tenets: everyone’s thinking something—shows even when she turns her hand to mainstream fare like Never Fear (also known as The Young Lovers).

In other hands, Never Fear—the story of an up-and-coming young dancer, Carol (Sally Forrest), who has her life and expectations reshaped by polio—could turn into a weepie. But Lupino, along with her co-writer and then-husband Collier Young, keeps it refreshingly low on sentiment. It’s hopeful without being cloying (give or take the final shot), and while it’s frank about loss, it doesn’t wallow. And it all rings true, in part because Lupino could draw from her own experience with polio and physical therapy.

That levelheaded approach is valuable when it comes to discussing disability, and Lupino’s warm-but-brisk treatment of the material is a definite plus. Between the intimacy and the accuracy, this feels like half-memoir, half-journalism, with small details—a doctor who’s spent time as a patient and knows recovery’s victories and limitations firsthand—and set pieces—a wheelchair square dance, a date ruined by someone else’s self-pity—that feel convincing and well-textured.

This would be a worthwhile movie on those grounds alone, but Lupino elevates it from “helpful” to “just plain good,” and she does it by zeroing in on Carol’s emotional responses. She refines the source of tension, so we’re not asking, “Will Carol walk again? Can she get her career back?”, but instead, “Can Carol redefine her life? What will she lose if she waits too long to do it?” Those are questions that hinge not on Carol’s diagnosis but on Carol as a person, on her own capabilities and the consequences of her choices. They’re inherently more dramatic, and they can’t be answered with a physical therapy montage.

They also bring other characters into the fold, especially Keefe Brasselle’s Guy, Carol’s fiancé and dance partner. Brasselle is a bit awkward and broad, but that works well with his character’s guilelessness: when he vows to give up the limelight and devote himself to ordinary work instead, we (and Carol) can trust that he means what he says … and we (and Carol) can still suspect he’s not smart enough to do a great job predicting his own future. He loves her, but is he emotionally resilient enough to go on loving her when she’s doing all she can to push him away? Should he be, even? In agonizing over her disrupted life, Carol winds up creating an opportunity for him to choose—one he wouldn’t even have realized he had. Never Fear knows that even good relationships sometimes come to natural but painful ends, and that gives its love story a real sense of risk.

One final bright spot I should mention is Hugh O’Brian’s Len Randall. Again, Never Fear is haunted by its sickly sweet shadow self, where upbeat Len—who starts and ends the film using a wheelchair, never transitioning, as Carol does, to crutches or a cane—is pure inspiration, existing only to show Carol that others have lost more and complained less. He does play that role to some extent, but both O’Brian and the script do significant work to move him beyond it. On the shallowest level, wheelchair users are often portrayed as sexless, but O’Brian is a charismatic smokeshow; he makes it impossible to believe Len is not getting action, even if it’s not on screen. That the movie never entirely embraces him as a viable love interest for Carol seems to come as much from its clear-eyed view of her own affections and prejudices as it does from Hollywood’s. It’s also careful not to play him as some kind of polio mentor. If he’s inspirational and appealing—to Carol and to the audience—it’s in a more generalized way, not as someone who has done a good job dealing with his new disability but as someone who simply has his shit together and is sometimes usefully impatient with people who don’t. Carol and Guy are in a shared coming of age story; Len already feels like an adult.

Lupino was still refining her directorial talents at this point, but Never Fear already points to her strengths. This could be a PSA, and instead it’s a well-paced human story with characters who react to each other—and conflict with each other—in believable and sympathetic ways. You could start a year—and a career—off with much worse.

Never Fear is streaming on Tubi and Amazon Prime (as The Young Lovers).

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