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Scott Reviews Terence Fisher’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death [Blu-ray Review]

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Dr. Georges Bonnet (Anton Diffring) is not a bad guy, but he’s starting to do some bad things. Having found a medical solution that prevents him from aging (it has to do with “glands,” so fashionable in this era), he has maintained his youthful appearance despite having lived for 104 years. But time is running out. The doctor who has performed the maintenance surgeries (Arnold Marle) can no longer operate, and he’s running late in even arriving. Georges has also fallen deeply in love, and isn’t ready yet to leave town, as his cover story demands. Can this polite society man maintain propriety with death knocking?

In the booklet accompanying Eureka’s new Blu-ray edition of The Man Who Could Cheat Death, Marcus Hearn quotes Hammer Film Productions managing director James Carreras in a 1958 interview as saying:

We’ve found a formula for spine-chillers that never misses…. You make the villain of your story look just like the good-looking man, or the pretty girl, you might see on the Underground any evening. You imagine you could trust him anywhere. Then suddenly, when you find yourself with him – wham! He starts to do terrible, awful, ghastly things.

This description proves a bit more thrilling than the actual experience of watching The Man Who Could Cheat Death, a film composed mostly of people having discussions in drawing rooms, few of which actually point to anything menacing. Most are fairly polite, in fact, as the potential villain rarely divulges too much to actually intimidate the potential victim. In fact, in most of these scenes, you can sense the director just off-camera, giving them the “stretch it out” motion to elongate the scenes as much as possible. For an 83-minute movie, this is not a terribly efficient or involving narrative. Information is repeated, or pointlessly obscured, causing characters to ask questions to buoy conversations that could have been had in about thirty seconds.

Occasionally these conversations are delightfully sexy, occasionally they’re sort of intriguing. It’s extremely rare that they provide any sense of suspense or terror. Fisher is a capable director, but he only really comes alive in the film’s few scenes of balls-out horror, including a perfectly deranged finale. Diffring is an excellent protagonist, performing in a slightly arch manner that suggests a man on the edge of madness (immortality narratives hinge on the idea that we’ll all go crazy if we live too long; their way of assuring us that sometimes death is better), but it’s not enough to juice so many tame scenes.

Eureka’s new Blu-ray presents a very filmic transfer that could have used a bit of sprucing up. Skin tones are far too pale, even assuming they only cast pale people, and damage is pronounced. Clarity and depth are handled well. Colors are a little muted, but could be inherent to the source – the horror scenes involve a good deal of green, which pops a lot more.

Aside from the aforementioned booklet and essay, the disc features interviews with critic/novelist Kim Newman and historian Jonathan Rigby, the combination of which gives the viewer an excellent overview of the film itself and the context in which it was released and received. The Hammer series of horror films were fairly groundbreaking in their day, both the bane of the censorship board and also a great deal more highbrow (well, bordering on middlebrow anyway) than the creature features that had dominated the genre in the decade prior to their arrival, and it’s interesting to consider a comparatively tame film like The Man Who Could Cheat Death in a era when cinematic content was so tightly regulated.

For fans of the Hammer style, I expect this release will be very pleasing, but I could never quite get onboard with its stasis and contentment. Nevertheless, this disc offers plenty of reason to purchase for those who feel differently.


Scott Nye

Scott Nye loved movies so much, he spent four years at Emerson College earning a career-free degree in Media Studies. Now living in Los Angeles, he's trying to put that to some sort of use. OFCS member, film writer, day-tripper.