The Man Who Could Cheat Death ** (1959, Anton Diffring, Hazel Court, Christopher Lee ) – Classic Movie Review 5567

Director Terence Fisher’s 1958 Hammer studios horror thriller is an attractively lurid and Technicolorful version of an old play by Barré Lyndon and 1945 film The Man in Half Moon Street about a mysteriously handsome scientist who has found a surgical way of staying young. Anton Diffring is good in the star role, and has a suitably other-worldly air as Dr Georges Bonnet, the 100-year-old who is taking glands from the living to make him seem 30 again.

Christopher Lee seems a bit down in the dumps as his doctor helper, Dr Pierre Gerrard, and Hazel Court is lovely but gives a rather dull performance as Lee’s girlfriend, Janine Du Bois, in an admittedly just dull and decorative role.

Jimmy Sangster’s limp and rudimentary screenplay damps the project’s fire, and the going sometimes gets tough. But the production looks handsome in Jack Asher’s cinematography and Bernard Robinson’s designs, and there is a reasonable quota of little chills.

Also in the cast are Arnold Marle, Delphi Lawrence, Francis de Wolff, Michael Ripper, Gerda Larsen, Ronald Adam, Marie Burke, Charles Lloyd Pack, Denis Shaw, Lockwood West, John Harrison, Ian Hewitson, Frederick Rawlings, Barry Shawzin and Middleton Woods.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5567

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