Four Sided Triangle – Hammer

Director: Terence Fisher
Screenplay: Terence Fisher, Paul Tabori
Based on a Novel by: William F. Temple
Starring: Barbara Payton, James Hayter, Stephen Murray, John Van Eyssen, Percy Marmont, Sean Barrett
Country: UK
Running Time: 81 min
Year: 1953
BBFC Certificate: TBC

Although we like to think Hammer began essentially with The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), the company had been going since the 1930s. In the 1940s, after the war, they found their calling adapting radio series as B-pictures and then with a deal with poverty row producer Robert Lippert (the man who ironically not only helped build Hammer but distributed Roger Corman’s first film Monster on the Ocean Floor (1954) as well), churned out a series of post-war British noirs usually starring down-at-heel Hollywood actors.

Adapted from a novel by William F Temple, Four Sided Triangle bridges their noir and their horror. It’s a science fiction melodrama romance, with vague proto-Quatermass scenes of lab work in a rural village. Told in flashback by Dr Harvey (James Hayter, later the voice of Mr. Kipling’s cakes), it is actually the story of scientists Bill (Stephen Murray) and Robin (John Van Eyssen, later Hammer’s doomed Harker in Dracula (1958). The men are working on a duplication device called the Reproducer. However, matters are complicated by childhood sweetheart Lena (Barbara Payton), and the two men’s war over her leads Bill, who is disappointed Lena loves Robin, to create a duplicate of Lena – Helen. However, Helen is too like Lena, and loves Robin not Bill. Robin’s due to marry Lena. What will happen?

What results is a typical 50s B-melodrama. The sci-fi elements are merely there to explain the double and give us a climax, though we have some nice sub-Kenneth Strickfaden lab work. There is some odd casting. The trio are supposedly contemporaries, despite Murray being born in 1912, Van Eyssen 1922 and Payton 1927. Murray’s casting is especially odd, as he was known for playing older characters like Dr Manette in A Tale of Two Cities (1958). The star, though is Payton, a rising American star whose career was thwarted by her off-screen life that made tabloid material. After a strong breakout in Richard Fleischer’s B-noir Trapped (1950), opposite fellow Hammer import Lloyd Bridges, she screentested for The Asphalt Jungle (1950), losing to Marilyn Monroe, but instead starring with James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950). However, after high profile westerns, her career decline began with Bride of the Gorilla, and thanks to her various affairs and torrid love triangle between one of her husbands, ageing Hollywod matinee idol Franchot Tone and the equally tumultuous Tom Neal (star of Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945), she ended up allegedly becoming a high class prostitute, homeless and dying at her parents house in 1967 aged just 39. With no attempt at the accent, she is even in her faded poverty row status, far too American to be a Home Counties English rose.However, her real life background and the similarities to this film’s plot add a poignancy.

The rest of the film isn’t great. While Terence Fisher tries his best, it’s a rather misogynist fantasy, though one that has elements of the far superior Frankenstein Created Woman (1966).

Trivia note – one of the young heroes is played by Sean Barrett, a top British child actor of the era, later in Dunkirk (1958 – as immortalised by Barrett’s character appearing on the Smiths’ sleeve of How Soon is Now), but then a successful voice actor, although best known to me as the deep-voiced Fr. Fitzgerald in the Father Ted special A Christmassy Ted (1996).

Film:

I watched the film from a streamed online screener, so can’t comment on the picture quality or extra features on the physical release.

Where to watch Four Sided Triangle