Four Sided Triangle – 4K

Four Sided Triangle
Hammer – 4K Ultra HD
1953 – 1.33:1
Starring Stephen Murray, Barbara Payton, John Van Eyssen 
Written by Paul Tabori, Terence Fisher
Directed by Terence Fisher

Touted as Hammer Studio’s first brush with monsters and mad doctors, 1953’s Four Sided Triangle features a monster, alright—the green-eyed variety. The jealous guy in question is Bill, played by Stephen Murray, and John Van Eyssen is Robin, both childhood lab rats who happen to be prodigies. Barbara Payton is Lena, their playground sweetheart who grows up to love one of the boys more than the other. In his own words, poor Bill is always too “sensitive,” and he’s crushed by Lena’s rejection. That is until his and Robin’s grand experiment proves a success. It’s a duplication machine that makes perfect copies of anything, a watch, a rabbit, even a human being. And Bill knows just what to do with it.

Considering the explosive potential, both emotional and fantastical, Four Sided Triangle is one of the least overwrought science-fiction films in cinema; it’s an otherworldly sob story with real-world pain. As the life-long friends, one too logical, the other too passionate, Murray and Van Eyssen underplay their roles in a way that grounds the fantastic aspects of the story. The unlucky Barbara Payton, while the most unremarkable of beautiful blondes, has a lost quality—call it true to life—that fits Lena’s capricious character like a tight sweater. James Hayter, an impish actor best known as Friar Tuck in Disney’s The Story of Robin Hood and his Merrie Men, and a practically perfect Samuel Pickwick in 1952’s The Pickwick Papers, brings his usual twinkle as narrator of the story. Whether that twinkle is always appropriate considering the solemn atmosphere may be up to your mood.

Murray has the toughest job: manufacturing empathy for a man whose actions are fueled by bitterness, self pity and greed—a wretch so needy he creates a double of his beloved so she may suffer twice for loving the wrong man. Four Sided Triangle is sometimes too close for comfort; an all too human horror movie.

Terence Fisher directed and co-wrote the script with Paul Tabori using William F. Temple’s 1939 Amazing Stories tale as their inspiration. The low budget no doubt hobbled the production but it may have been for the better, tho the sets are not much more polished than dinner theater trappings, and the story no more action-packed than a daytime soap, the message at the center of this tangled tragedy is crystal clear.

Triangle was one of those hard-to-find films that slowly emerged into the light and gradually became easy to see. It quickly gained a reputation as plodding and dull. It’s far better than that. Those harsh  reactions may have been because of expectations: in the late sixties, when Four Sided Triangle became ubiquitous, Terence Fisher was best known for his Hammer horrors, those overtly theatrical barnburners featuring blood and bosoms in ripely sensuous color. In light of those head-turning entertainments, Four Sided Triangle, in black and white and decidedly undercooked, looked like a drag.

A drag no longer. As part of an extravagantly appointed series of Hammer 4K remasterings of also-rans like Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, and top-tier classics, like The Quatermass Experiment, Four Sided Triangle gets the deluxe treatment. Now subtitled “A John Gore Studios Company,” Hammer has done a spectacular repair job on Fisher’s worthy melodrama—restoring both its reputation and its appearance. The film itself looks superb, as evocative as one of Conrad Hall’s Outer Limits episodes (the cameramen on Triangle were Reg Wyer and Len Harris).

The formidable box (more like a case) contains one UHD and one Blu-Ray with the content duplicated across both formats, a booklet containing new essays, material from the Hammer archives, and reproductions of the UK and US pressbooks. There’s also a double-sided poster tucked inside.

Disc supplements include a new commentary with historian Melanie Williams and critic Thirza Wakefield, and a new commentary with actor and film historian Jonathan Rigby. I Am Not Ashamed is a short documentary by Lucy Bolton about the beleaguered Barbara Payton, In the Sticks Sci-Fi!, a piece on Four Sided Triangle from William Fowler and Vic Pratt, and Things to Come from Neil Sinyard examines Four Sided Triangle, its stars, direction and thorny sexual politics.

The booklet features articles by Bruce G. Hallenbeck, Gavin Collinson, and  Neil Sinyard, along with an archive interview with Len Harris, one of Hammer’s longtime camera operators.