Four Sided Triangle (1953)
Directed by Terence Fisher

Film Review

Hammer's first dalliance with science-fiction, Four Sided Triangle, clearly owes much to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and is an obvious precursor to the company's subsequent run of Frankenstein films, beginning with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).  The basic plot idea - a man who, denied the woman he desires, is driven to create an exact copy of her - is one that had previously featured in Hammer's Stolen Face (1952) - but here Hammer departs from practical science and heads off into mad scientist territory, complete with a makeshift laboratory stuffed with all manner of weird electrical paraphernalia, test tubes and flashing lights.  The plot is pure hokum (as any schoolboy with the vaguest familiarity of Einstein's famous E=mc² will see in a moment) but somehow the reassuring presence of James Hayter (he of the mouth-watering voice for a brand of exceedingly good cakes) makes it oddly plausible.

At this time, Hammer was still a small-time filmmaking operation turning out micro-budget B-movies.  It's first real success came with The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), adapted from a popular British television serial that had recently aired.  Hammer profited from the short-lived B-movie sci-fi craze whilst it lasted before striking it lucky a second time with The Curse of Frankenstein, the film which gave the company its brand identity and reason to be.  Thereafter it would be forever associated with a peculiarly British kind of horror, founded on European folk story and Gothic romanticism.

Four Sided Triangle was directed by Hammer stalwart Terence Fisher, who had already shown his worth on a number of slick crime films for the studio and who would go on to give it its biggest successes, in the Gothic horror department.  Fisher's penchant for visual storytelling is somewhat compromised by this film, on account of its overly verbose script (the film seems to be 99 per cent dialogue and 1 per cent action), but the sequences set in the laboratory are suitably tense and eerie, anticipating those memorable set-pieces in the director's subsequent Frankenstein films.

Film Synopsis

In a typical English village, Bill and Robin are two inseparable boys whose friendship is threatened by their rivalry for an attractive girl of their own age, Lena.  When they grow up, Lena heads off to America to in search of fame and fortune as an artist, whilst the boys begin their studies at Cambridge.  Having graduated with honours, Bill and Robin return to their home village and begin work on a mysterious scientific project.  The only person they take into their confidence is Dr Harvey, their close friend and mentor since childhood.  Harvey is astonished with what the two enterprising scientists have created, a device called the Reproducer which can make an exact duplicate of any object.   Lena makes an unexpected return to the village and is soon assisting Bill and Robin in their experiments.  Bill is surprised when Lena and Bill decide to get married.  He has never ceased to love Lena and seeing that she can never be his he sets about developing the Reproducer further.  He begins experimenting on live animals, his goal being to produce a perfect copy of Lena for himself...