I Am Not Afraid (1939) Reviews

I Am Not Afraid was the preview title for the 60-minute Warner Bros. crime melodrama The Man Who Dared. A remake of 1931's Star Witness, the film concerns the efforts made by gangster to intimidate murder witness Matthew Carter (Henry O'Neill) into silence. When all else fails, the villains kindap Carter's young son Ralph (Dickie Moore) threatening in no uncertain terms to kill the boy if Carter testifies in court. Coming to the rescue is Ralph's grandpa Ulysses Porterfield (Charley Grapewin), a pugnacious Civil War veteran who deploys military strategy to rescue the kid from the gangster's clutches. Like many other Warner Bros. films of the period, I Am Not Afraid takes a firm and decisive stand against the political hooligans then in charge of Europe: at one point, Porterfield shames Carter into cooperating with the authorities by observing that American gangsters were no better than "Hitler, Mussolini or Stalin" (This at a time went most Hollywood studios were treading very lightly in the field of current affairs, terrified of losing the valuable European market) ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi