It’s not hard to see the attraction of Barre Lydon play for Hammer – it’s a sort of Dorian Gray tale (NB why did they never film that story?) about an artist/doctor who manages to stay young through operations involving gland extraction. This inevitably leads to – you guessed it – murder. Probably not enough murder to satisfy the Hammer faithful but there are some wonderful sets and costumes, and a strong cast.
Anton Diffring steps into a role that presumably Peter Cushing was too busy to play; but Christopher Lee pops up as Diffring’s romantic rival. There’s also Hazel Court, who poses topless for Diffring – we see her bare back and everything which is pretty racy. The handling doesn’t conquer the stage origins of this story – there’s lots of scenes with people standing around drawing rooms talking. More could have been made of the Lee-Diffring-Court triangle. It’s also a bit slow and lacks fire, even if it ends with a fire (fire finales tend to be ho-hum in horror films of this era, there were so many of them).
On the sunny side, as previously mentioned, it looks gorgeous: sets, colour, costumes, etc. The acting is polished, the women sexy and there are a couple of decent shocks: revelation of all the busts of women and Diffring’s age and finding out Delphi Lawrence is still alive (she looks hotter in her gypsy prison outfit than at the beginning). It’s a shame they didn’t juice this up a little, add some more horror, murders and sex. Hammer would return to the “eternal life” theme with She.
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