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"L'ennui mortel de l'immortalité," as Cocteau would have it, somewhere between Dorian Gray and Jack the Ripper. The doctor is also a sculptor, "something to do with glands and statues," Anton Diffring's resemblance to Conrad Veidt is part of the style. The unfinished effigy marks the unconsummated attraction between him and the society beauty (Hazel Court), the secret is that he's a centenarian keeping younger appearances via a bubbling green elixir locked in a safe. Another model (Delphi Lawrence) interferes with his ritual and takes a corrosive hand to the face, the recomposed protagonist gazes with annoyance at the marred figure sprawled on the laboratory's floor. "You can see death staring you in the face, but I can't," he moans to the longtime Viennese colleague (Arnold Marlé), an organ transplant is necessary but the fellow surgeon (Christopher Lee) is unwilling. The police inspector (Francis de Wolff) has a word for the mystery, "unreasonable." Fin de siècle Paris is a handful of tasteful chambers on the inside and on the outside pure and impenetrable mist, more than enough for Terence Fisher to evoke the body in Gothic upheaval. The doctor stands by his "monstrous" love, the aged associate voices divine morality: "Have you become God, all of a sudden, to judge that you are more important than the other man?" A parathyroid must be found and a tavern wench fits the bill, the fog-drenched screen cuts to the freshly extracted gland being dropped into a beaker with a plink. The storeroom doubles as dungeon, the red glow behind a barred door catches the eye of the captive heroine, Court in her white gown just ahead of Édith Scob in Les Yeux sans visage. The climactic putrefaction visualizes the fear, "a lifetime of illness in one moment." Morrissey pursues the strand of thought in Flesh for Frankenstein.
--- Fernando F. Croce |