By November 1958, Hammer had been on quite a roll for two years, since The Curse of Frankenstein had gone into production in November 1956. Dracula (1958), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) had consolidated their position as the new masters of Gothic horror while films like The Abominable Snowman (1957) and Quatermass 2 (1957) proved that they were just as adept at science fiction. But when director Terence Fisher, cinematographer Jack Asher and designer Bernard Robinson took what was then known as The Man in the Rue Noire, a version of the Barré Lyndon 1939 play The Man in Half Moon Street scripted by Jimmy Sangster (it had already been filmed in 1944 by Ralph Murphy at Paramount), their winning streak was temporarily derailed.
Paris, 1890. Dr Georges Bonnet (Anton Diffring) abruptly calls a halt to a party he’s hosting to dash back to the safe in his office. Although he appears to be in his mid-30s, he’s actually 104-years-old, his youthful demeanour maintained by parathyroid gland transplants every ten years and regular imbibing of the elixir keeps bubbling away in the wall safe. His latest transplant is due, but Professor Ludwig Weiss (Arnold Marlé) who helped him develop the process (he must have been very young when he did so given that’s nowhere near 104 years old himself) is late and the process of aging is accelerating. He’s disturbed while taking his latest dose of medication by Margo Philippe (Delphi Lawrence), a woman who models for his sculptors, and he disfigures her face when he tries to silence her. When Weiss finally arrives, he’s suffered a stroke and is incapable of performing the operation, so the hunt is on for a replacement surgeon before it’s too late. They may have found him in the shape of Dr Pierre Gerrard (Christopher Lee, who would played another Dr Pierre Gerrard in the first of Hammer’s psycho-thrillers, Taste of Fear/Scream of Fear (1961)). Gerrard’s lover and Bonnet’s ex, Janine Du Bois (Hazel Court) agrees to model for Bonnet but ends up being held hostage when Gerrard refuses to go ahead with the surgery.
The Man Who Could Cheat Death is an odd duck – it looks as ravishing as ever, thanks to the combined talents of Fisher, Asher and Robinson who probably couldn’t have made a film look tawdry even if they tried, but Sangster retains long passages of dialogue that were probably riveting on stage (where the cast included Leslie Banks, Ann Todd and Malcolm Keen) but don’t make for the most exciting film. It looks gorgeous, but there’s not a lot going on beneath the beautifully designed and shot surface. The sets of course are lovely but as there are no exteriors after the establishing opening shot of Paris, we spend a lot of time in these stunningly appointed apartments and offices and it all gets a bit claustrophobic.
It all feels uncharacteristically static by Fisher’s usual energetic standards, made up of long takes of chat – one duologue between Bonnet and Ludwig is just interminable – and lacking the verve that he’d brought to the previous Gothics. Shots of a wild-eyed Bonnet opening his safe to reveal a bubbling, steaming flask of elixir ready to be consumed are strangely comical – how does he keep it in that state inside a safe? And despite a nasty bit of business with a burning handprint etched on Margo’s face after Bonnet touches her during the wearing off of his elixir, the film seems unnecessarily squeamish with most of the deaths taking place off screen.
Anton Diffing just came out of a disastrous run in the musical science fiction comedy Mister Venus opposite Frankie Howerd which closed after just 16 performances. Despite music from Russ Conway and a book from soon-to-be sitcom giants Ray Galton and Johnny Speight, the run at the prince of Wales Theatre in London hadn’t gone well and suddenly Diffring found himself with a hole in his schedule, a hole filled when Peter Cushing declined the role of Bonnet and Hammer came calling. Diffing – who had had already appeared in an adaptation of the play just a year earlier for the British Hour of Mystery television series along with his co-star here, Arnold Marlé – must have been grateful for the work.
Hazel Court was making her final appearance for Hammer (she’d been Elizabeth in The Curse of Frankenstein) and European viewers would have seen rather more of her than British audiences. It’s only brief, but Hammer included a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it topless scene as Janine models for Bonnet. The shot was in the version submitted to the British censors in February 1959 though inevitably, they were told to remove it.
The Man Who Could Cheat Death wasn’t a great success for Hammer, certainly not on the scale of their previous Gothic, The Hound of the Baskervilles. The company bounced back with the excellent war film, Yesterday’s Enemy, directed by Val Guest, which actually opened in cinemas two months before The Man Who Could Cheat Death but was shot a couple of months later, and the Gothics were back on track with the far better The Mummy (1959).
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