Review #2594: The Man Who Could Cheat Death.
Cast:
Anton Diffring (Dr Georges Bonnet), Hazel Court (Janine Dubois), Christopher Lee (Dr Pierre Gerrard), Arnold Marlé (Professor Ludwig Weiss), Delphi Lawrence (Margo Phillipe), and Francis de Wolff (Inspector LeGris)
Directed by Terence Fisher (#257 - The Curse of Frankenstein, #258 - Dracula [1958], #272 - The Hound of the Baskervilles [1959], #469 - The Revenge of Frankenstein, #833 - Spaceways, #857 - Frankenstein Created Woman, #858 - Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, #859 - Dracula: Prince of Darkness, #1280 - The Brides of Dracula, #2096 - The Mummy [1959], #2263 - Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, #2307 - The Curse of the Werewolf, #2430 - The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll)
Review:
Ah sure, let's tab another Terence Fisher horror movie down the list, even if not every Hammer movie ends up going the way anyone expects. The film is based on the 1939 play The Man in Half Moon Street by Barré Lyndon, which had been previously adapted into a film in America under that title (with Nils Asther as the star); it probably isn't too absurd to make a case of slight parallels between this and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray within the chained restraint of the real person living so long to do so many things. At any rate, Jimmy Sangster was tasked to write the screenplay. Apparently, Peter Cushing was envisioned for the lead role, but he bowed out due to claiming to being exhausted from the filmmaking of The Hound of the Baskervilles (they had a verbal agreement but not a written contract with him). It did not please Paramount Pictures, who served as a partial financier and distributor. Cuts were made to the film involving some nudity and a bit more of a violent ending that only barely has been found and restored to release on home media, although the runtime is roughly the same at 83 minutes. This was part of one hell of a stretch for Fisher between The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959), this film, and, well, The Mummy (1959).
It sounds like it has an interesting start: you get to see a bit of the "refined gentleman does his spiel before slinking away to reveal the real guy" thing, complete with a reveal of him...turning a bit green if he doesn't get his elixir juice in his body. It's a stagy movie with a few interesting lighting choices (as done by Jack Asher, who did a handful of early Hammer movies), suffice to say. You might be wondering what hocus-pocus-magic thing they've made up for the film title to make sense: Two men found a way to possibly mess with the aging process: parathyroid gland transplants every ten years (the real glands deal with maintaining calcium and phosphate levels through producing/secreting a hormone and I'm sure there are further things to say about it). Of course, it's hard to rely on one guy to get these glands transported when your co-creator decided aging was a fine thing to do and thus is pretty old (and pretty late) to the latest transplant day (the elixir is merely a temporary solution). Part of the problem the movie has in not really going as far as it could with its premise is the bare body count because of all the melodrama that has to come with a doctor who happens to double as a sculptor that is more interested in, say, women rather than snatching glands. It's the kind of casual British sci-fi horror hocus pocus that probably goes well with, say, something from the 1930s than at the close of the 1950s, but I suppose it makes a suitable pairing with Fisher's subsequent The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960). Court makes for a fairly lively presence to attract curiosity in sensual charm. Diffring often attracted adversarial roles (as one does for a German-born actor, and it probably helped that he starred in the failed Hammer pilot Tales of Frankenstein in 1958 when it comes to seeing him here trying to hold his own against Lee and Court. This is somewhat successful in basically inviting you in to see just how much of a bastard one can be to basically believe that it is wise to try and conquer death as if it was a woman (notice with the latter he makes sure to get a good sculpture of their breasts). This is one of those movies that probably would benefit from seeing a remake mainly to see how one would handle the idea of trying to stall death while also getting into plenty of seduction and murder at the same time, honestly. In general, it's a quality Hammer movie that had room for improvement, but even an average Terence Fisher movie from them is still better than no movie at all.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
