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If there's one director who is identified with British gothic cinema
more than anyone else, and credited with giving colour to (international)
horror cinema, this man's undoubtedly Terence Fisher (though to be honest,
he wasn't the first to make horror flicks in colour, just the first to use
colour to its fullest effect). And it was also Fisher - together with his
home studio Hammer of course - who relaunched (gothic) horror cinema
pretty much single-handedly at a time (the late 1950's) when everyone
believed the genre dead and buried. It's somewhat ironic then that
someone who has injected new blood into an ailing genre was actually a
late bloomer who hadn't directed his first movie until 44 years of age and
hadn't zeroed in on the horror genre until his early 50's. Also, during
his career, Fisher received remarkably little critical attention let alone
acclaim for his
work and was generally dismissed as a hack director, while especially
after his death, with film history correcting many views of old, he is
more and more considered a true master of the genre.
Early Life, Early Career
Born in 1904, Terence Fisher received his education at a military
school, joined the merchant marine at age 16 - but dropped out after five
or so years, considering himself
unsuited for life on the sea. He then tried his hand on several
(land-based) jobs until he eventually entered the film industry in 1933, becoming a
clapper boy. The first film Terence Fisher worked on reportedly was the
musical comedy Falling for You (1933) by Jack Hulbert (who also
starred) and Robert Stevenson. In 1933 though, Fisher was already 29 years
old and thus a bit old for a clapper boy ... Slowly, Fisher moved up the
ranks in the mid-1930's, serving as third assistant director on Aunt
Sally (1933, Tim Whelan), and from 1934 on as assistant editor on a
bunch of films starting with Evensong (1934, Victor Saville). In
the mid-1930's, Terence Fisher had no higher aspirations than to become
chief editor himself, so when he reached that goal in 1936 (at 32 years of
age), he figured he had reached everything he ever wanted/needed to reach,
and he stayed with the job for more
than 10 years, editing films for big (and not so big) names of the British
film industry such as Robert Stevenson (Tudor Rose, 1936), William
Beaudine (the Will Hay comedies Where There's a Will and Windbag
the Sailor, 1936), once more the Jack Hulbert-Robert Stevenson pairing
(Jack of All Trades, 1936), Walter Forde (Atlantic Ferry,
1941, The Peterville Diamond, 1942, Flying Fortress, 1942, One
Exciting Night, 1944), George King (Tomorrow We Live, 1943),
and Leslie Arliss (The Wicked Lady, 1945). It was
Fisher's work as film editor that saved him from serving in the second
World War, as film editors were seen as essential for the homefront
wartime efforts. Terence Fisher's last assignment as editor came in 1947
with Master of Bankdam, yet another film by Walter Forde. By that
time though, the studio heads of the Rank
Organisation, Fisher's employer during that part of his career, somehow noticed the
talented (not all that) young man, and so it came into
being that Fisher got his first assignment as director at 43 years of age
...
Terence Fisher, Director: The
Early Years
Back in the late 1940's, the Rank
Organisation, then a major British filmstudio, ran a small studio outfit, Production Facilities,
on the side, basically a teswting ground to try out untested yet promising
directors on low budget fare,
people like - you guessed it - the former editor Terence Fisher. The
first film Fisher did for Production Facilities was Colonel
Bogey (1947), a supernatural comedy that was well enough made
concerning the level of pure craftmanship, but had very little special to
offer. Because of it's supernatural theme, Colonel Bogey is often
cited as a precursor for latter things to come in the horror realm - but
that's pure bullshit, there's remarkably little to link the film to later Hammer-shockers.
And whoever says Fisher's choice of topic alone concerning his first film
must mean something has very little insight in low budget filmmaking,
where directors are not really choosing their films themselves -
and as if to prove this, Fisher's next two films for Production
Facilities are anything but horror but all over the place genre-wise,
the romance A Song for Tomorrow (1948) - featuring later
Fisher-regular Christopher Lee in a very early, small role - and To the
Public Danger (1948), a morality play about the dangers of alcoholism.
Apparently,
Fisher's work on these programmers for Production Facilities has
caught the attention of someone at Gainsborough,
by then actually another affiliate of the Rank
Organisation. Soon, Fisher was hired by the studio to helm films
with a considerably bigger budget than those he did for Production
Facilities, starting with the drama Portrait from Life (1948) -
which is today mainly remembered for being British actor Anthony Steel's
movie debut. Like with Production Facilities earlier, Fisher had
not been married to any particular genre at Gainsborough,
so the drama Portrait from Life was soon followed by the romantic
comedy Marry Me (1949), the Noel Coward-romance The Astonished
Heart (1950, co-directed with Antony Darnborough), and the mystery So
Long at the Fair (again 1950, co-directed with Antony Darnborough)
starring Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde.
Early Hammer Due
to the lack of any real success, the Rank
Organisation shut down Gainsborough
in 1951, which naturally forced Terence Fisher out of a job.
Freelancing, Fisher did one film for a small production company called New
World Pictures (not affiliated with Roger Corman's company of the same
name [Roger Corman bio -
click here]), the low budget police thriller Home to Danger
(1951), before signing up with a little studio called Hammer,
which was then specialized in producing B movies for the
British and (via Lippert
Pictures) the American market - which is why early Hammer-films
often starred American actors (mainly from the B-list though). Hammer
hadn't specialized on any one genre yet - and was by no means the horror
powerhouse it had become in later years -, but was experimenting with
various genres, of which crime dramas, often of the noir variety, proved
to be the most cost effective, as they were relatively easy to produce,
had a certain attraction to audiences everywhere, and could thus be easily
sold to American audiences. But when I say these films were
cost-effective, I'm not saying they were especially successful, they
probably mostly made their money back and even a tiny profit, but none of
the early Hammer-movies
(noir or otherwise) have actually been box office smashhits let alone
become classics - even though at least some of them are quite good (though
in terms of cinematic craftsmanship rather than directorial inventiveness.
Fisher's
first film for Hammer
was The Last Page/Man
Bait (1952), and actually it was a very decent film, a noirish
crime thriller based on a play by English thriller writer James Hadley
Chase featuring British bombshell Diana Dors as a naive blonde trying to
be a femme fatale. Sure, it wasn't exactly free of clichés and it did
lack directorial ingenuity to become anything more than an entertaining
genre film, but for what it was, a low budget crime thriller, it was quite
good. With Wings of
Danger (1952), Stolen
Face (1952), Mantrap (1953), Blood Orange/Three
Stops to Murder (1953), Face the Music/The Black Glove
(1954), Murder by Proxy/Blackout
(1954) and The Stranger Came Home/The Unholy Four (1954),
Terence Fisher made more of the same, again for Hammer:
cost-efficient crime thrillers that were quite entertaining by themselves,
but certainly no classics ... with the possible exception of Murder
by Proxy, a noir in the tradition of The Big Sleep (1946,
Howard Hawks) that despite an over-convoluted story pulls all the right
stops and that would deserve more attention than it actually gets. Even
before Terence Fisher had proven what he was able to do in the realm of
crime thrillers given the chance with Murder by
Proxy, he also tried his hands on the science fiction genre for the first time with
two films - considerably less successful though:
- The Four-Sided
Triangle (1953) is a film about two scientists creating a
artificial human - but actually it's more of a love story (and a
pretty stupid one at that) about one of the scientists wanting to
(re-)create the woman of his dreams - the wife of his colleague. Then
though his creation falls for his colleague as well ... and this is not
a comedy.
- Spaceways (1953) is a film about the space-race and the Cold
War, all wrapped up in a murder mystery with some romance thrown in - but when in a film about
rocketship development all the rocket launch scenes are derived from
over-used stock footage of V-2 experiments, you kind of notice you're
not in for something all that big.
Besides crime and science fiction, Fisher also tried his hands on
sports drama for Hammer,
with the film Mask of Dust/Race for Life (1954) - but that
movie is not much more than a cliché riddled story about a racecar driver
having to decide between the woman he loves and car racing, and the most
interesting aspect about it is its many cameos by real racecar drivers
like Stirling Moss and Reg Parnell.
Back in the early days of Terence Fisher's association with Hammer,
their relationship was anything but exclusive, as he also accepted work
from other companies, like Distant Trumpet (1952), an hommage to
missionary doctors in Africa, which he made for Meridian Films, or
the crime drama Final Appointment (1954) for ACT Films.
However, more non-Hammer
work from circa the mid-1950's onwards came from television, where he
directed episodes of series like the anthology series Douglas
Fairbanks jr Presents (1953 - '55), Colonel
March of Scotland Yard (1956) starring Boris Karloff [Boris
Karloff bio - click here], The
Adventures of Robin Hood (1956 - '57) and the crime series Dial
999 (1959). All of this television work though was certainly
inferior to the films he had made for Hammer
and other studios, and certainly inferior to the classics he would soon be
making - but then again, TV-work meant bread on the table, right?
By 1955, Fisher's collaboration with Hammer
had come to a temporary halt. As of yet, Fisher had failed to put his own
stamp on the company's output, and likewise Hammer
was still searching for a formula to strike box office gold - thus the
separation of the man and the company seem s to be reasonable (if not
necessary), and there is no report that there had been any animosity
between the two parties prior to the (temporary) split.
During the next few years and besides his TV-work, Fisher made a
handful of movies for various companies, like the comedy Children
Galore (1955) for Grendon Films, the crime comedy Stolen
Assignment (1955) and the crime drama The Last Man to Hang?
(1956) for ACT Films, and the crime thrillers The Flaw
(1955) and The Gelignite Gang (1956, co-directed with Francis
Searle) for Cybex Film Productions.
Apparently, Fisher hit it off particularly well with Francis Searle,
who produced his Final Appointment and Stolen Assignment and
co-directed The Gelignite Gang, because the two man soon made some
high-flying plans and formed a production company together, Delta
... but unfortunately, all this company ever released was one movie, Kill
Me Tomorrow (1957), a crime drama co-directed by Fisher and Searle and
starring Pat O'Brien and Lois Maxwell. The film was, as were many of
Fisher's early films, a decent effort in the noir-realm - but it was
hardly anything out of the ordinary.
1957 was also the year Fisher returned to Hammer
- but the Hammer
he returned to had somewhat changed from the one he left 3 years ago, and
he would help to change it even more ...
Frankenstein, Dracula, the
Hound, the Mummy ... the Classics
In 1955, the year after Fisher's departure, Hammer
had finally struck gold with The
Quatermass Xperiment (Val Guest), a feature remake of a popular BBC-sci-fi
television serial (click
here). The film wasn't only extremely successful in Great Britain,
where it of course profited from the popularity of the serial (which was
aired live and could thus not be repeated), but also in the USA and Europe,
where it hit just the nerve with the audiences who loved alien invasion
stories back in the day.
The
Quatermass Xperiment was soon followed by more of the same, X - The Unknown
(1956, Leslie Norman) and the inevitable sequel Quatermass
2 (1957, Val Guest), which both captivated audiences at home and
abroad like the first film.
These three films were the first bona fide hits for Hammer,
and they got the studioheads thinking: If these three science fiction films
with undeniable horror undercurrents could draw large audiences, couldn't
there be a market for genuine (as in gothic) horror as well? There hadn't
been a successful gothic shocker for about 10 years, since the demise of
the Universal
horror cycle, but that's exactly why gothic could work again:
other than 10 years ago the market wasn't over-saturated with gothics but there was now an actual gap that
needed to be filled.
Now of course, you couldn't make these films like
10, 20 or 25 years ago anymore, the audience was asking for more - on one hand
this was horror more explicit than back in the day, with scenes showing
gore and bodyparts (which all might look perfectly tame today looking back at old Hammer-shockers,
but these scenes were shockingly innovative when first released onto the
bloodthirsty audience), and on the other
hand this was colour ... sure, there were horror movies in colour before, Universal's
Phantom of the Opera
(1943, Arthur Lubin) and The
Climax (1944, George Waggner) quickly spring to mind, but these
films used colour merely as a gimmick with little actual narrative
function or effective uses. It was upon Hammer,
and especially upon Terence Fisher, to really marry colour to the horror
genre, to prove that an over-saturated colour spectrum can seem just as
menacing as creepy black and white - after all, blood is red, isn't it?
This little introduction beautifully sets the stage for The
Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the first gothic Fisher directed for
Hammer. The
Curse of Frankenstein was of course a bit of a gamble, also
artistically, because with Universal's
Frankenstein
(1931, James Whale) and its sequel Bride
of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale), and of course with Boris
Karloff's iconic portrayal of the monster [Boris
Karloff bio - click here], the way a Frankenstein
film was supposed to look was almost set in stone. Furthermore, the
distincive likeness of the monster (a big factor in the success of Universal's
Frankensteins) was copyrighted by Universal.
Fortunately enough, nobody at Hammer,
least of all Terence Fisher, was planning on copying James Whale's/Universal's
undeniable masterpieces, instead a fresh approach was chosen that paid
only little attention to the monster (a then virtually unknown Christopher
Lee) but turned Victor Frankenstein himself into the villain of the piece, yet
not a villain out of evil intentions but a man of moral ambivalence -
and by having him portrayed by Peter Cushing, then a celebrated TV-actor
who was especially good in bringing the ambivalent aspects of the character to the fore,
one can't but congratulate Terence Fisher for his choice of lead actor.
The two men would by the way collaborate time and again in the future, as
would Fisher and Christopher Lee, and of course Lee and Cushing. From the
number of films these three men would work on in the future (either all
three or only two of them) alone one can see that horror history was
written with The
Curse of Frankenstein.
The
Curse of Frankenstein might have been a gamble, but the gamble
totally paid off, audiences in the UK, all over Europe and the USA flocked
in to see the film, loved its blood and macabre details, accepted the
total absence of a bona fide hero, and even though he was already 52 when
he made the film, Terence Fisher could claim for himself that he has
infused new blood into a genre that was lying dormant for about a decade
with a radically fresh approach.
And speaking of new blood: With The
Curse of Frankenstein being such a phenomenal success, Hammer
was quick to track down other established horror properties to put their
(and Terence Fisher's) spin on, and the first thing they came up with was,
to noone's real surprise, Dracula.
For many critics, Terence Fisher's Dracula/Horror
of Dracula (1958) was an even greater achievement than The
Curse of Frankenstein, but I beg to differ: Dracula
is a very fine film indeed, and undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of
gothic cinema, but it was by far not as radical and radically different in
approach as The
Curse of Frankenstein. On the contrary, the film remains fairly
(though not completely) faithful to Bram Stoker's source novel and does
share quite a few elements with its 1931Universal-counterpart
by Tod Browning (click here)
while Fisher's The
Curse of Frankenstein steered completely clear of James Whale's
earlier film. Also, Dracula
is neither as explicit nor as genuinely macabre as Fisher's earlier film -
but that said, the blood still flows red in Dracula,
and Christopher Lee, who was catapulted to stardom with this film, is a
very fine vampire count easily rivalling Bela Lugosi's iconic performance
[Bela Lugosi bio - click here], with Peter Cushing making an impressive and
energetic Van
Helsing who gives the character a presence, depth and ambivalence
unheard of in earlier versions of the story. Plus, the erotic
undercurrents of the novel downplayed in the 1931-version are
much more overt here (though don't expect anything explicit), and
Christopher Lee plays his Count fully aware of his sexuality, and his
vampire was one of the very first movie vampires to sport
fangs (which can be regarded as penis symbols of course).
Fact is that Dracula's
success exceeded even that of The
Curse of Frankenstein, and from now on at the latest, the road was set for Hammer,
which became the horror studio of the UK in the 1950's and 60's, with the
majority of the studio's films being gothics - also because one could use
the same sets again and again ...
After the (inevitable yet quite likeable) first sequel to The
Curse of Frankenstein, The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958),
which has Peter Cushing's Frankenstein doubling as mad scientist and
doctor for the poor (so much for ambivalence), Hammer
got Terence Fisher to update another cornerstone of horror literature, the
Sherlock
Holmes-tale The
Hound of the Baskervilles (1959). One has to understand here that
no Sherlock
Holmes-movies have graced the big screen since Basil
Rathbone's run as the detective, which lasted from 1939 to 1946, and who
for many was the ultimate Sherlock
Holmes as it is (there were quite a few TV-adaptations
featuring other actors though). So adapting a Sherlock
Holmes-tale for the big screen was a bit of a gamble,
especially one that had already been filmed with Rathbone in the lead in
1939 (click
here) - yet Hammer
and Terence Fisher went ahead anyways, again casting their dream team of
Peter Cushing (as Sherlock Holmes) and Christopher Lee (as Henry
Baskerville) in the leads, playing up the horror aspects of the story
while almost ignoring its romance aspects (which took center stage in the
1939-version) and relying on the (by now typical) over-saturated colours,
macabre details and beautiful gothic sets (many of them reused from
earlier films) to put a new stamp on the story. And much more than Basil
Rathbone, Peter Cushing brings the moral failings of the Sherlock
Holmes-character to the fore, which allow him to even risk
the life of his client only for the sake of solving the case.
Fisher's The
Hound of the Baskervilles was quite possibly the very best
adaptation of the novel, it easily blows the Rathbone version out of the
water and it has over the years become acknowledged as a genuine horror
classic - yet while reasonably successful it did not become the big hit Hammer
expected it to become - actually the studio wanted to develop the
supersleuth into a third series besides Frankenstein
and Dracula,
but dropped the option after the film had not become a smashhit along the
lines of The
Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula.
It's interesting in this respect though that while Hammer
stayed away from the property for good after this film, Terence Fisher, Christopher Lee
and Peter Cushing would all be drawn back to the character later in their
careers, Cushing first in 1968, taking over the role in the BBC-series
Sherlock
Holmes from Douglas Wilmer, then again in 1984 in The Masks of
Death, interestingly directed by Hammer-regular
Roy Ward Baker and co-written by Anthony Hinds of - you guessed it - Hammer-fame.
About Fisher's and Lee's future involvement with Sherlock
Holmes we'll talk a little further down.
After tackling iconic characters in his last handful of films, Terence
Fisher settled for something smaller (figuratively speaking of course)
with The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959) - and maybe due to the
lack of an iconic character, this film makes the moral ambivalence of
Fisher's gothics which I have mentioned time and again earlier on much
clearer: The film lacks any genuine hero or even so-called anti-hero, yet
its villain if you may, the character played by Anton Diffring who simply
wants to live forever (and who doesn't) no matter what it costs (including
human lives) is not a bad guy in the classical sense of the word, he is
not evil for the evil's sake but has an at least partially understandable
cause ...
With The Mummy (1959),
Fisher returned to by now more familiar waters, leaving his mark on
another horror icon (the mummy, in case you wondered). However, while
Fisher's takes on Frankenstein,
Dracula
and Sherlock
Holmes were nothing less than inspired, The
Mummy was merely good craftsmanship, and the fact that the film is
still a pretty decent horror thriller and a vast improvement over the Universal's Kharis
the Mummy features from the 1940's can be credited to his
talent as a director rather than any particular vision of his.
Like The
Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula,
The
Mummy was eventually spun off into a series, but here, Fisher
directed none of the sequels, which were all pretty bad though.
Downward Spiral: The Early 1960's
Within just a handful of years, Terence Fisher has not only resurrected
gothic horror and made it profitable, he has also turned a relatively
insignificant British production house into the world's number one horror
producer - and while critics often say that the look and feel of Fisher's
horror classics - and their quality, subsequently -, can be attributed more
to the Hammer-housestyle
than to his skills and vision, then this is at best half-true: Sure,
Fisher did not have total freedom over his material, concerning aspects
like casting, art direction and script (or even choice of script, quite
possibly), and he had to work budget-conscious - but on the other hand, he
helped create the Hammer-housestyle,
the studio simply didn't produce any gothics (and only very few period
pieces) before his.
Even after having directed a handful of classics in just a few years in
the late 1950's, the 1960's started on a promising note for Terence
Fisher, with The Stranglers of Bombay (1960). Sure, this film was a
step down inasmuch as it was in black and white just after Fisher had
proven his mastery of colour filmmaking, and from today's point of view,
it can hardly be considered politically correct, and yet it is a pretty
tense thriller about religious fanatics with a predilection for
strangling in colonial India.
After The Stranglers of Bombay, Fisher revisited the Dracula-myth
- with one major problem though: He didn't have a Dracula for his movie Brides
of Dracula (1960) because Christopher Lee refused outrightly to
play the vampire count ever again (a promise he eventually broke in 1966)
and the heads at Hammer
were smart enough to not replace charismatic Lee with another actor.
Instead, the focus of this film was shifted to Dracula's nemesis Van
Helsing (played once again by the equally charismatic Peter
Cushing), and a script was cooked up that had only little to do with Dracula
from two years before, even if it claims to be a direct sequel storywise.
And thanks to Fisher's competent to inspired direction, Brides
of Dracula became another pretty decent movie, even if it
obviously did not meet the expectations of the studio at the box office,
since Hammer
did not make another Dracula-film
until 1966, when Lee finally decided to return to the role, and Peter Cushing
didn't return to the Van
Helsing-role until 1972's Dracula
A.D. 1972 (Alan Gibson).
Having already tackled Frankenstein,
Dracula, Sherlock
Holmes and the Mummy,
it seems to have been only a question of time until Hammer
would let Terence Fisher try his hands on Jekyll
and Hyde, which he did in 1960 with The Two Faces of Dr
Jekyll - to unfortunately disastrous results. You see, The Two
Faces of Dr Jekyll was a radical re-interpretation of Jekyll
and Hyde, which has Paul Massie as a somewhat unattractive,
reclusive and even boring scientist, Jekyll, turn into Hyde, a quite
handsome young man who feels at home with and is immediately accepted by
society - but of course he's also a killer. The problem with this film is
not so much that Hyde is the handsome one here but that Jekyll is a rather
unlikeable fellow whom you can't very well feel for - which of course
totally destroys the basic (inner) conflict of the film.
With the werewolf, yet another iconic horror creature, Terence Fisher
felt much more at home when he made Curse
of the Werewolf (1961), a much more traditional story that has
Oliver Reed in the role of the young man who turns into a wolf every full
moon, a condition he desperately tries to rid himself of. The film is
certainly not on par with Fisher's classics from the late 1950's, but as a
(slightly clichéd) piece of genre cinema, it's actually pretty good.
Equally traditional in tone is The Sword of Sherwood Forest
(1960), which Fisher made just prior to Curse
of the Werewolf and which was one of his very few excursions into
non-horror territory during that time. Instead, it was a visit of the Robin
Hood-myth, which he was already familiar with from directing for the TV-series The
Adventures of Robin Hood - and wouldn't you know it, The
Sword of Sherwood Forest even brought Richard Greene, the lead of the series (which only ended a month or so prior to the film's release), back to the
lead role (but had pretty much everyone else substituted for
whatever reason). The film though is well-enough made, but nothing to get
excited about, and thus it only helped to typecast Terence Fisher as a
horror filmmaker.
(By the way, in all, Hammer
tried its hands on the Robin
Hood-property 3 times, the other two attempts were Men
of Sherwood Forest [Val Guest] from 1954 and 1967's A
Challenge for Robin Hood [C.M.Pennington Richards].)
That Terence Fisher eventually directed The
Phantom of the Opera (1962) seems to be almost inevitable, since
he has already tackled pretty much every other iconic horror monster, and just
like with The Two Faces of Dr
Jekyll, Fisher tried a radically different approach with his version
of the Phantom,
one in which the title character, as played by Herbert Lom, eventually
emerges as the good guy and is even allowed to die a hero's death. Now I
generally welcome new approaches to age-old stories, but in the case of The
Phantom of the Opera, the changes make little sense, as with the
Phantom being a good guy, the whole film lacks an actual villain. All the
film presents us with in that department is a crazy dwarf (Ian Wilson),
but this character is little more than a joke and totally lacks
motivation.
It should be noted here that The
Phantom of the Opera was a very ambitious project for Hammer,
reportedly the studio's most expensive movie so far - yet it failed to
deliver at the box office and resulted in a (minor) fall-out between
Fisher and what was pretty much his home company, Hammer.
As a result, Terence Fisher took Christopher Lee and went to Germany,
where notorious bandwagon jumper Artur Brauner and his company CCC
Filmkunst wanted to try something that Hammer
had already given up on, launch a Sherlock
Holmes-movie series. With Fisher and Lee, who was back then
still a hot item, on board Brauner figured he could profit in two ways, on
one hand cash in on the relative success of The
Hound of the Baskervilles of course, but on the other he also
wanted to
have an instantly recognizable series of his own to rival his chief rival Rialto's
Edgar
Wallace-series.
Now one can't blame Artur Brauner for the attempt to launch a Sherlock
Holmes-series, and even giving its lead role to Christopher
Lee was an almost inspired choice (even though he never quite matched
Peter Cushing's rendition of the character), yet while this all might
sound like instant cult in writing, the actual film resulting from all of
this, Sherlock
Holmes und das Halsband des Todes/Sherlock
Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962) is decidedly less than great
- I would even go so far and claim it's a particularly uninspired movie
and among Fisher's worst (while The
Hound of the Baskervilles was among his best). However, the
failure of this film isn't Fisher's fault alone: Sure, you can tell he was
not really interested in the stuff he has been given to work with and
delivers pure craftsmanship, but he was also given a horrible screenplay
(by veteran Curt Siodmak, incidently [Curt
Siodmak bio - click here]), had to work on a too low budget
and in black and white after he had proven what he could do to the
detective when using colour with The
Hound of the Baskervilles. That all said, Sherlock
Holmes and the Deadly Necklace is kind of cute from today's point
of view as a charmingly dated and clumsy attempt to make a period
detective film, but its qualities are more in the camp department and it doesn't even come close in quality to Fisher's
classics...
Terence Fisher gave up on Sherlock
Holmes after that one, but Christopher Lee apparently could
not get enough of the series that easily, playing Sherlock's brother
Mycroft in Billy Wilder's Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
with Robert Stephens in the title role, before once again becoming
Sherlock Holmes in a pair of mysteries in the productions of which Silvio
Berlusconi had his hands before becoming prime minister of Italy: Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1991, Peter
Sasdy) and Incident at Victoria Falls (1992, Bill Corcoran).
Having found only moderate success in Germany, Fisher returned to the
UK and made a film for Lippert
Pictures, a company that in the 50's and 60's was heavy on
importing British films into the USA but also occasionally produced films
on both sides of the Atlantic. The film in question is the old dark
house-comedy The Horror of it All (1963), with - of all people
- singer Pat Boone in the lead. And you know what, Boone's reasonably ok
in this film actually, it's the rather unfunny script that brings the film
down, coupled with the fact that Fisher was a man of many a talent, but he
just wasn't cut out to make comedies. To cut a long story short, The
Horror of it All was anything but a success, is probably Fisher's most
obscure film of the 1960's - and it might have been part of the reason why
he returned to Hammer
after this one.
Unfortunately, Fisher's next film for Hammer,
The Gorgon (1964), wasn't exactly a classic either: After having
resurrected one classic horror monster after another, Fisher and Hammer
decided to go for something a little more original, trying to incorporate
a monster from Greek mythology into a horror plot, the snake-haired
Medusa. But while this all sounds mighty ambitious, nobody had any better
idea of how to treat the Medusa than to feature her in a story set in the
moors already familiar from The
Hound of the Baskervilles and The
Mummy. The resulting film is one of Fisher's more boring pictures
...
Much more interesting was The
Earth Dies Screaming (1964), another film made for Lippert
Pictures, shot in black and white and on a tiny budget, which was
also Fisher's first excursion into bona fide science fiction in a good
decade - and despite its budgetary restrictions and a somewhat uneven
script, The Earth
Dies Screaming has turned out to be a pretty decent film about
aliens trying to annihilate the human race as a whole, and the attempts of
the last few survivors to fight and defeat the alien invaders and their
robots.
Sequels, Mostly - The Long
Fade-Out
By the mid-1960's, Hammer,
still Terence Fisher's house studio, had long surpassed its climax, and
was becoming less and less interested in putting out ambitious, even
trailblazing projects, instead they were relying (and cashing in) on their
own past successes - in other words producing sequel after sequel of their
past hits, first and foremost of course The
Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula
and The
Mummy. And since Terence Fisher back in his days had not been
considered a name director or even author (like he's now) but needed to
make money, he simply had to play ball.
Thus in 1966, he accepted the assignment to direct Dracula:
Prince of Darkness. Now the fim isn't without siginificance
inasmuch as it marked Christopher Lee's return to the lead role after 8
years of absence, but it's also a very formulaic vampire-gothic, to
which Terence Fisher lends his hand as a seasoned horror director, but
shows little in terms of actual vision or inspiration. Sure, if you like Hammer-movies
as such, you won't be disappointed by this one, but it's far from being
the cinematic revelation that Fisher's first Dracula
was.
At this time(the mid- to late 1960's), Fisher proved to be more
interesting when away from Hammer,
like with the science fiction film Island
of Terror (1966), which he made for small fry production house Planet
Film Productions. Sure, the plot of a cancer antivirus that
develops a life of its own and attacks people to suck out their bones
(yup, not merely bone-marrow but bones as a whole) is pretty silly, and
the actual depiction of the antivirus doesn't help one bit, but Fisher's
sure hand as a director manages to iron out all the film's inconsistencies
and make this into a very decent piece of low budget science fiction that
at least makes sense in itself nevertheless. No masterpiece maybe, but totally watchable.
Likewise, Night of the Big Heat (1967), another science fiction
movie Fisher did for Planet
Film Productions, is at least an interesting watch: This time
around, aliens heat up an island in the North of the UK for their sinister
purposes. Again, the film is no masterpiece, but quite entertaining for
the piece of genre cinema that it's supposed to be.
Back at Hammer,
Terence Fisher actually managed to infuse a bit of new blood into the Frankenstein-series
with Frankenstein
Created Woman (1967), which actually manages to shift the
attention from Frankenstein himself (as played by Peter Cushing) to his
creation played by Susan Denberg, who somehow is the seductive female
combination of an unlucky couple of dead lovers who use the new body to exact
revenge on those who have wronged them. It's interesting to see that the
character of Frankenstein has switched to being a good guy in this one,
while the creature is very attractive (much more so than the couple it was
made from) but also more homicidal than Frankenstein's previous creations
(even though her murders are somehow understandable if not justifiable).
The Devil Rides Out
(1968) was pretty much Terence Fisher's last attempt to make something
more worthwhile than series movies, a very effective and tightly paced
thriller about a family's fight against satanists. The film was more
mature and subtle than Fisher's usual output from pretty much all of the
1960's, and really showed what Fisher was capable of doing given the
chance. Of course, one might argue that the film was based on a book by
famed novelist Dennis Wheatley and scripted by none other than veteran
Richard Matheson, which is quite a notch or two above the usual material Fisher was given to work with, which in turn automatically results in a
better film - but having said that, one can't help but notice that The
Devil Rides Out features a few especially silly plotholes which
are only made reasonable by Fisher's direction.
As good as the film was however, The
Devil Rides Out did not hit a nerve with the audiences, and thus
Fisher was returned to the Frankenstein-series,
which was also losing steam and audience appreciation but still promised
reasonable returns at the box office.
Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969) though presents the title
character as a meaner person than ever. In Frankenstein
Created Woman he was, as stated, almost a good guy, though a
morally a bit ambiguous one, while here he's almost pure evil, a rapist
and eventual murderer who cannot justify all his actions with his
experiments and research (this time mostly in the field of brain
transplantation) anymore. Sure, Peter Cushing's depiction of the character
is still outstanding, and Fisher directs the whole thing with a sure hand,
but due to a totally muddled, badly conceived script you simply can't
bring yourself to care too much for Frankenstein the character
anymore, which seriously hurts the film.
After Frankenstein Must be Destroyed, Terence Fisher (temporarily)
retired from filmmaking, and why wouldn't he, he was already 65 years of
age.
In the meaintime, the horror world changed
quite a bit: Gothics of the sort Hammer
were coming more and more out of style, while cheap European productions
that put an extra emphasis on the sexual components of the horror stories
they tried to tell swamped cinemas all over the Western hemisphere (of
course not the first-run houses but the grindhouses and fleapit theatres
that actually did run horror moviesand where companies like Hammer
made a considerable portion of their profits from). Yet the most deadly
blow to independent horror-filmmaking came in 1973 with The
Exorcist (William Friedkin) - which is of course a genre classic
no doubt, but it also proved to the major Hollywood studios that horror
was a genre ripe to exploit and that it paid to muscle the (independent)
competition out of the game. Big budget Hollywood did just that, of
course.
For the longest time, Hammer
had tried to move with the flow, but with only moderate success: Their
attempts at creating erotic horror films resulted in well-crafted films -
that were way too tame to give the continental competition a run for the
money. An attempt to relaunch the Frankenstein-series
with the rather amusing The Horror of Frankenstein (1970, Jimmy
Sangster) with Ralph Bates in the title role failed to really catch on
with the audiences, and attempts to create martial arts crossover movies
with the likes of Shatter
(1974, Michael Carreras) and The
Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974, Roy Ward Baker) might seem
cute in retrospect but neither did they fare as well at the box office as
expected nor are they really good films.
So ultimately in 1974, Hammer
came up with the idea to resurrect their original Frankenstein
yet again, to again be played by the always dependable Peter
Cushing. And for the resurrection, the studio even hired the man
responsible for the original Curse of Frankenstein
once more, Terence Fisher (of course), by now 70 years old. The resulting
film, Frankenstein
and the Monster from Hell (1974), is an enjoyable and enjoyably
old-fashioned little film in which Fisher proves he's still able to handle
a gothic (even if the film lacks the inspiration of his classics) and
Peter Cushing proves why he and no other should be identified with the
character of Frankenstein
- and yet, it did little to renew interest in the series and pretty much
was only the last nail in Frankenstein's
coffin back in the day.
After that, Terence Fisher retired from filmmaking completely, and
there are nowadays many speculations as to why, and even some unconfirmed
reports that he has over the years become an alocoholic who was impossible
to work with.
The real reason though was probably way more mundane: The guy was 70 by
the time he made Frankenstein
and the Monster from Hell, which seems a good retirement age for
me in any job. And since Terence Fisher never saw himself as an artist to
begin with (even if some of his films might be considered works of art
nowadays) and didn't have anything more to prove, why would he go on
making films, especially since his home studio Hammer
at the time was getting into financial troubles as it was, and it also was
a bit late for Terence Fisher to start anew - and once again, why should
he?
When Terence Fisher died in London, England, in 1980, film historians
were only starting to re-evaluate his work, that has previously only been
regarded as the indifferent output of a studio hack. Since his death
though not only
his influence on the Hammer
house style but on the gothic genre as a whole has been honoured numerous
times, and his (initial) renditions of Frankenstein,
Dracula
and Sherlock
Holmes have long become iconic. Plus, when watching Fisher's
best films, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that of all people
someone like Hollywood eccentric Tim Burton calls him one of his major
influences ...
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