Trying out my big telly again wot's got YouTube on it, I dallied on FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE. Oh, one of the many Hammer films I haven't seen! Oh, another Fishy Hammer that had eluded me! I haven't even seen SPACEWAYS. But you know how it is - You're not particularly wanting to see something, then it's on a big screen (a big telly) and you've got ime to watch it, so what do you do? Walk out of your own bedroom?
And so it came to pass that, in my quiet village, the gentle jollity of small-town life was interrupted by... two boys and a girl having anguished pre-love fun at a school play, then they all go their separate ways. The girl (Barbara Payton) who goes to the States, and the two boys (Stephen Murray and Jonathan Van Helsing-Eyssen) who go to Oxbridge, England, and come back to experiment in a barn. Then Barbara Payton comes back and the sparks fly, almost literally.
You'll all know the plot details if you're here at all at all, so I won't regurgitate. Suffice to say that I really liked it. It seemed to me to look like it was foreseeing THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. James Hayter as the narrating old father-figure parallels, to a certain extent, some of the traits shown by Paul Krempe towards his "pupil" turned (almost) mentor. The lab scenes put me in mind of CURSE too, even if Malcolm Arnold's score seems to hark and hearken back to the old Universals. Stephen Murray has a profile that is part-Cushing but mostly Liam Neeson in SCHINDLER'S LIST (same hairline, forehead and nose-connection). The whole thing ends in a Fishy fire in which we're "not sure" which gal is which (FRANKENSTEIN CREATED WOMAN you muthafuckas?), although I did ask Terry Fisher about this last week and he replied, "Me? An auteur? I'm not even interested in what film I'm making!"
Whatever Terry Fisher knew or didn't know about his greatness certainly rubbed off on me when I saw the rather splendid FOUR SIDED TRIANGLE last week.