The second of Hammer’s Les diaboliques (1955)-inspired psychological thrillers (the first was Seth Holt’s Taste of Fear/Scream of Fear (1961) found Michael Carreras taking the helm and, in keeping with the French inspiration for the films, writer Jimmy Sangster again set it in France. Taste of Fear had been set on the French Riviera, whereas Maniac is set a little further down the cost in the Camargue, “where wild horses roam, fighting bulls are bred and violence is never far away…” according to an opening caption.
The film starts with a sleazy scene of schoolgirl Annette Beynat being raped (off camera thankfully) as a hot jazz cue from composer Stanley Black blasts from the soundtrack, seemingly egging on the perpetrator Janiello (Arnold Diamond). He’s beaten insensible by the girl’s father, taken back to his workshop and tortured to death with an oxy-acetylene torch. After that, pretty much nothing happens for the first half hour or so. Four years later, American artist Jeff Farrell (Kerwin Mathews) dumps his girlfriend Grace (Justine Lord) to stay in the same small village where the crime took place to paint its breath-taking scenery. Annette (Liliane Brousse) now lives with her stepmother Eve (Nadia Gray) while her father languishes in a nearby psychiatric hospital. Jeff embarks on an affair with Eve while also flirting with Annette. Eve drags Jeff into a plot to free her husband but is harbouring a causes Jeff to question if they’ve sprung the right man (he’s played by Donald Houston, but is he who Eve claims him to be?) and which puts Annette’s life in danger.
Maniac is built in a typically tricksy Jimmy Sangster script (the writer can briefly be glimpsed in the background, walking past a restaurant), less concerned with the mechanics of driving someone mad, more in a standard revenge plot. An attractive cast should arouse more interest than it does, but their sketchy characters get bogged down in a colourless romantic triangle and Sangster gives the actors little to get their teeth into. Indeed, at times, some of them seem quite bored by it all – Mathews and Brousse dance a particularly lethargic twist that the locals seem to enjoy watching but it hardly sets the screen alight.
And that lethargy runs throughout the film. The first two thirds are beautifully shot in black and white CinemaScope, particularly the lovely vistas of the wild, untamed beauty of the Camargue, but very unengaging. It was rare for Hammer to travel this far from Bray Studios at the time so cinematographer Wilkie Cooper makes the most of the occasion but even the landscapes can’t distract us away from the fact that the story is terribly routine.
Until the end that is when Sangster rather ties himself in knots, with a mess of twists and new revelations that don’t always hold up to scrutiny. The final moments, set in cavernous stone galleries of the Val-d’Enfer at Les Baux-de-Provence are certainly striking and Donald Houston really lets rip, only a step away from twirling his moustache in a barnstorming performance. But it’s too little, too late. Few of the characters have any redeeming features so we really don’t care about them too much, and indeed many are so unlikable that they make it impossible for us to care.
As well as Houston and Mathews, we get Hammer regulars George Pastell (The Mummy (1959), The Stranglers of Bombay (1959), The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964), She (1965)), Arnold Diamond (The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), Paranoiac (1963), The Anniversary (1968)) occasional visitors like Norman Bird (Cash on Demand (1961) and the striking Jerold Wells (The Pirates of Blood River (1962)) and imports like Brousse and Gray. They’re an interesting ensemble and it’s all the more disappointing that they’re wasted on a pedestrian thriller like this.
The Hammer psychologicals improved rather when Freddie Francis came on board for the same year’s Paranoiac (1963) and 1964’s Nightmare, with Fanatic/Die! Die, My Darling! (1965), Hysteria (1965), The Nanny (1965), Crescendo (1970), Fear in the Night (1972) and Straight on Till Morning (1972) following in their wake. In the UK, the film was overshadowed by its marvellous double bill mate The Damned (1962) but looked a lot better in the States where it was paired with William Castle’s awful The Old Dark House (1963).
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