Here's some background: In 1972 when Fear Is The Key was released Hollywood was still in financial trouble -quality was up (early '70s produced many great films with Coppola, Russell, Altman and Peckinpah at their most prolific peak) but the studios had been burned in the '60s and lost a fortune on blockbusters. There was an informal ceiling on budgets -I recall that no film was greenlighted with a budget as high as $15 million until the last half of the '70s when jerky producers like De Laurentiis and the Salkinds brought back the epics. No more Cleopatras and Darling Lilis for a few years. This was a period of economizing, not wasting money on advertising or backing a film that did not perform -they just went on to the next one, and were especially keen on avoiding the buildup of large backlogs of unreleased (especially foreign-made) product as had happened in the '60s. As another poster has stated, wide releases were not in vogue yet: Jaws revolutionized that, shortly after the Bronson film from Columbia titled Breakout was the first major release to ever debut at more than 1000 screens at once. Fear's stars Barry Newman and Suzy Kendall, both of whom have more recently developed devoted cult followings, were not big names at the time, and never achieved bankable star status. Also, there was no video (VHS) or even cable tv market in existence; the afterlife of a movie was sales to network tv or in tv syndication packages. Kendall was obviously better known in Britain, but neither she nor Newman were big in foreign markets, where famous U.S. stars meant something at the boxoffice. It is understandable how this film would not have been deemed significant enough to warrant a VHS release, or later DVD release when sifting through "older" titles: the emphasis was on 1980s or circa 2000 newer films to exploit coming off their more recent theatrical runs. Quality had nothing to do with it -it was all about selling and finding a hook (not so different from nowadays). So it unfortunately was lost, along with hundreds of other worthy films - I remember seeing Making It with Kris Tabori during that period - a very fine low budget Fox film that met the same fate -see its Board for pleas of "where can I find this film". By the way, I was one of Newman's early fans, having enjoyed his film The Lawyer and then having seen Vanishing Point pre-release on a sneak preview (double billed with The Dunwich Horror!) in Philadelphia at a theater which always had a sneak preview every Wednesday -never telling what the pig-in-a-poke would be in advance. I liked Vanishing Point so much I bought a Dodge Challenger and used to see VP over and over again back in the day at Cleveland/Akron/Dayton drive-in theaters, where Fox would double-bill it with many films like French Connection and later Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, until the prints were unusable.
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