The Man Who Could Cheat Death is a 1959 British horror film, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Anton Diffring, Hazel Court, and Christopher Lee.
Jimmy Sangster adapted the screenplay from the play The Man in Half Moon Street by Barré Lyndon, which had been previously filmed in 1945.
In Paris, France in 1890, Dr. Georges Bonnet, a doctor and hobbyist sculptor, abruptly ends the fashionable party he is hosting.
Professor Ludwig Weiss of Vienna, co-discoverer of this anti-ageing process, is three weeks late in arriving at Georges's home to perform the latest transplant.
Surété Inspector LeGris begins to investigate Margo's disappearance and arrives at a dinner party hosted by Georges for Janine Du Bois, a former lover, and Dr. Pierre Gerrard.
Secretly, Ludwig convinces Pierre to perform the transplant surgery, claiming that Georges is deathly ill and in urgent need of treatment.
Pierre arrives the following morning to perform the operation, but Georges tells him that Ludwig was unexpectedly called back to Vienna.
Georges takes Janine to a storeroom which holds his sculptures and proudly shows her the first figurine he made as a boy at the age of 12.
Credited: Uncredited: The lead role of Bonnet was originally offered to Peter Cushing, who turned it down six days before shooting started.
However, Cushing had not signed a final contract with Hammer, and nothing could be done,[1] although an angry Paramount, which was partly financing and distributing the film, 'relegated to picture to the lower half of double bills in the States'.
[2] The lead went to Diffring, who had played it 18 months earlier in the British ABC-TV adaptation of The Man in Half Moon Street, an episode of the programme Hour of Mystery.
The stone bust of Janine that is shown repeatedly in the film is in fact 'a plaster cast made from Court's torso'.
[9] For home viewing in the UK, the video was given a 12 certificate by the BBFC on 28 August 2015 for 'limited' but 'moderate injury detail', which includes scarred faces, rapid ageing, strangulation and death by fire.
But invention and embellishment in this field appear to have been exhausted',[13] and the Motion Picture Exhibitor issue of 1 July 1959 describes The Man Who Could Cheat Death as suffering from 'relying mainly on talk'.
The film is referred to by journalist Howard Maxford as a 'commercial and artistic disaster' and a 'bog standard surgical thriller' that is 'by no means a Hammer classic'.
He calls Terence Fisher's direction 'curiously unambitious', characterised by 'many scenes filmed in lengthy, static takes, almost as if from the stalls of a theatre'.
[16] In the 'Hazel Court' chapter of Scream Queens: Heroines of the Horrors, author Calvin Thomas Beck praises the performances of the three main actors.
Carter calls it 'on the whole (...) a solid, impassioned performance that makes it a shame that this was her last role for Hammer', even though her character, Janine, has the 'distressing trait of not being able to smell something fishy even if there was a whale in the room'.