American made-for-TV movies from the 1970s are hard enough to find these days (with a few notable exceptions), but Canadian ones are even rare. And if The Man Who Wanted To Live Forever (released theatrically overseas as The Only Way Out Is Dead and at one time titled The Heart Farm) is anything to go by, it’s probably best that we leave them that way.
There’s a decent idea knocking about deep inside the bland presentation, nondescript performances and tedious plotting – multi-billionaire T.M. Trask runs an isolated medical research centre which hires heart specialist Dr McCarter Purvis as its new head. But Purvis soon uncovers a monstrous conspiracy – ailing old men are being kept alive by spare parts salvaged from young guinea pigs. But the idea is poorly developed and ultimately goes nowhere – a much better take on the same basic plot can be found in Rainer Erler’s West German TV movie Fleisch/Spare Parts (1979).
At the time, this had a topicality that’s certainly missing now – today heart transplants and fairly routine, but in 1970, the first such operation was barely three years old. Sadly now, the no doubt once-fascinating discussions of the procedure seem clunky and unnecessary. No doubt the grisly close-ups of the surgical procedure itself would also have been novel at the time but we’ve become so inured to the sight of such things on reality TV shows that it no longer has the ability to shock like it once did.
But even if some elements of the film hadn’t – inevitably – dated, it would still fall down on the lack of conviction in the performances. Stuart Whitman looks bewildered and half-asleep most of the time and his relationship with Sandy Dennis (looking lovely but apparently as comatose as Whitman) is wholly unconvincing. Burl Ives simply wanders in and out of the narrative doing his best sinister villain turn and not really making much on an impact at all. There’s a terrible stiffness to all the performances, leading to characters that simply fail to engage on almost any level.
The film only really comes to live in the climax, a well-staged chase sequence in which the dying Trask oversee the pursuit of Whitman and Dennis through the snowy landscapes surrounding his remote facility. Ives shows his true form in these final scenes and the moment when he orders the execution of a pilot who survived the crash of one of his pursuing helicopters simply because his blood group matches his own is genuinely chilling.
Made-for-TV movies from the 1970s – be they American or Canadian – tend to have something of a poor reputation and to be fair it’s not entirely undeserved. But there are plenty of rather fine examples of the form, among them The Chill Factor/A Cold Night’s Death (1973), Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973), The Night Stalker (1972) and, of course, Steven Spielberg’s excellent Duel (1971). Sadly, The Man Who Wanted to Live Forever is nowhere hear that level of excellence…
The EOFFTV Review 