Hammer special editions are the craze in 2025, and another fine disc label gets in on the action with a vintage title directed by Terence Fisher, with the sumptuous Hammer Technicolor look provided by cameraman Jack Asher. Anton Diffring murders to maintain an indefinite, if shaky, state of immortality; Hazel Court is the beauty who discovers his criminal secret. Chris Lee is good in a ‘straight’ role. For Hammer fans there’s another obvious attraction — a version of the show that reinstates the film’s sexier Continental version. All this and 4K too.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Vinegar Syndrome
1959 / Color / 1:66 widescreen / 83 min. / Street Date November 25, 2025 / Available from Vinegar Syndrome / 66.98
Starring: Anton Diffring, Hazel Court, Christopher Lee, Arnold Marle, Delphi Lawrence, Francis De Wolff, Charles Lloyd Pack, Michael Ripper.
Cinematography: Jack Asher
Production Designer: Bernard Robinson
Makeup artist: Roy Ashton
Wardrobe: Molly Arbuthnot
Film Editors: James Needs, John Dunsford
Composer: Richard Rodney Bennett
Screenplay Written by Jimmy Sangster from a play by Barr  Lyndon
Produced by Michael Carreras
Directed by Terence Fisher

Very soon after this show, Hammer left the Technicolor printing process behind, and with it the painstakingly beautiful cinematography of Jack Asher. The main prospect for reissuing Hammer’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death in a new 4K Ultra HD edition should be to showcase cameraman Asher’s lush, vibrant images. This edition certainly delivers that ‘original Hammer look,’ but horror collectors will snap it up for another reason that will become obvious.

Hammer became the envy of every English production company when their initial horror hit won them co-production contracts with more Hollywood studios: Columbia, United Artists, Universal. 1959 brought The Man Who Could Cheat Death, a remake of an already obscure ’40s Gothic from Paramount Pictures. With Hammer’s best director, the remake offers several of the elements that broke box office records worldwide. But it also reflects Hammer’s unwillingness to develop their product line.

Set in Paris, the story reshuffles familiar motifs from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, adding a streak of Edwardian medical horror. The handsome, womanizing artist Dr. Georges Bonnet (Anton Diffring) throws soirées to show off his latest sculptures, hiding the fact that he is desperate for his old partner Professor Ludwig Weiss (Arnold Marlé) to show up — Bonnet needs him to perform an ‘uter-parathyroid’ operation that will give him ten more years of youth and vitality. Until then Bonnet must drink a secret potion every six hours, or revert to an alarming state of decrepitude. Bonnet’s old flame Janine Dubois (Hazel Court) has her present suitor Dr. Pierre Gerrard (Christopher Lee) drop by a Bonnet party. She once posed for a sculpture, and would like to re-ignite the relationship.

The elderly Dr. Weiss arrives, but a paralyzed arm prevents him from operating. Bonnet tries to interest Janine’s Dr. Gerrard to perform the gland-switch procedure. That’s when inspector LeGris (Francis De Wolff) begins nosing around. A current Bonnet model has mysteriously disappeared, Margo Philippe (Delphi Lawrence). The dossier LeGris is accumulating on Dr. Bonnet doesn’t make sense . . . it indicates that the artist is at over a hundred years old!

One co-production deal allowed Hammer to remake Universal’s 1930s horror classics. Paramount’s smaller library of horror properties yielded Barré Lyndon’s original play The Man in Half Moon Street, about a mysterious man who both benefits and suffers from a surgically obtained fountain of youth. Paramount had adapted it as  a spooky if tame chiller, starring Nils Asther and Helen Walker. That show has lots of fog, and withholds many secrets until the final act.

At this time Hammer was assigning their homegrown star writer for multiple projects — in 1958-’59 Jimmy Sangster’s writing credit appeared on 9 features, 5 of them for Hammer. Michael Carreras’ production has plenty going for it, beginning with fine work from designer Bernard Robinson and makeup artist Roy Ashton. The new horror star Christopher Lee is present as well. As Lee didn’t want to be forever typecast as monsters, he likely welcomed playing a secondary romantic lead.

Jimmy Sangster’s talky script is not ideal. It takes the assembled cast eighty minutes to discover what the audience knows going in, namely that Georges Bonnet is cheating death by committing terrible crimes. We see the pattern from the outset and there are few surprises along the way. Bonnet has been squeaking by for about seventy years. His latest victim is actually alive; imprisoned in his secret dungeon, she’s now crazy as a loon.

Paramount’s original Man in Half Moon Street put an emphasis on atmosphere, and treated its horrors with a misty, look-the-other-way discretion. It now plays as too quiet, too uninvolving. Hammer’s remake doesn’t go in for those subtleties. Jimmy Sangster dropped the earlier film’s hesitant teasing. Everything that was ambiguous is now explicit. The dependable Terence Fisher directs in the sensationalist style he learned on  Gainsborough thrillers of the ‘forties. There are few opportunities for Fisher to construct shock scenes. Sangster’s script has almost no action, as in a TV play. People instead talk about Bonnet’s mysterious activities.

This color remake has fewer characters and limits its action to three or four beautiful but claustrophobic rooms. The interior settings sometimes feel too familiar — Hammer reuses the same ‘locations’ in and around its Manor House headquarters at Bray. Bonnet’s basement dungeon appears to be Dracula’s crypt redressed. Some colorful windows remind us of a medical office set from the previous year’s  Frankenstein film.

The diabolical Dr. Bonnet’s could have used a little more ‘plausible deniability’ in his nefarious activities. His behavior is unbelievably suspicious. He insinuates dark deeds to his uncomprehending lady friends, and all but threatens harm to Janine should Dr. Gerrard not perform his desired surgery. Policeman LeGris rattles off numerous facts linking Bonnet to odd disappearances. He then sighs in regret because he hasn’t any clues.

We’re confirmed fans of actor Anton Diffring, who normally wins us over with his authoritative manner. Here he is directed to push the character to extremes, as if to compensate for the lack of exciting action. In context several of his solo moments play like miscalculated overacting. Bonnet frequently forgets to take his ‘medicine’ on time, which leads to repeated close-up displays of eye-popping anxiety. While Christopher Lee underplays, Diffring offers twitches and facial contortions. Director Fisher matches his excess with extreme accent lighting. The vault holding Bonnet’s secret potion is bathed in a ghostly green light. The result is creepy but more than a little forced.

Anton Diffring would soon make his mark as a major horror villain, but not for Hammer. To play a marvelously egotistical surgeon-madman in the next year’s  Circus of Horrors, the actor dials back his performance. It’s an absurd, cartoonish character, yet Diffring’s delicious blend of cultured villainy is irresistible.

Always the professional, Christopher Lee doesn’t try to expand his supporting role. His fans should appreciate his restraint. Arnold Marlé had started in German films 40 years before. He had just made an excellent impression as the High Lama in Hammer’s  The Abominable Snowman. He’s good as the elderly Dr. Weiss, but the script keeps him front and center with Diffring for far too long. Weiss and Bonnet had once been school chums; one remained youthful while the other reached old age. The script does not take advantage of the opportunity to examine their strange relationship.

As it turns out, the film’s most memorable presence is its leading lady, Hazel Court, whose Janine is a vibrant, positive presence. She does more than just show off some handsome period gowns; she is clearly fulfilled by her nude art modeling. The narcissistic Georges Bonnet only thinks he’s in control of his life, while Janine fully experiences hers, even in this unusually stuffy vision of Paris. Thus it is a bit of a letdown when Jimmy Sangster’s screenplay puts Court back in ‘damsel in distress’ mode. The disc commentaries note this missed opportunity as well. Near the finale Janine encounters one of Dr. Bonnet’s earlier victims, imprisoned in a basement room. The two women were previously rivals, but they don’t even talk to each other.

With his shallow motivation, we never learn more about what makes Georges Bonnet tick. Sangster’s script simply depicts the mechanics of his unnatural predicament, overwhelmed by the ‘Catch-22’ of dependency on his mystery potion. Neither is Bonnet’s artistic urge examined very much. He is just a criminal freak, unlike other fantasy folk that end up in some perversion of the natural aging process:  The Leech Woman,  4D Man and  The Asphyx.

When Bonnet’s eyes begin to revert to their true age, makeup man Roy Ashton provides some dramatic facial makeup. But the doctor’s final transformation is an unimpressive mask that looks good only in stills. Not well presented is the disturbing disfigurement left on the face of a Bonnet victim during an early struggle. Bonnet has an unexplained acid touch, a sensational fillip like the green light that pops up whenever he experiences ‘transformation distress.’ What we remember most from the show is Jack Asher’s sensuous cinematography and the go-for-it performance of Hazel Court. As with many livewire actresses relegated to genre work in the 1950s and ’60s, Ms. Court looks game for anything . . . the only thing holding her back are the prudish filmmakers.

Vinegar Syndrome’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Man Who Could Cheat Death really pops on our 65″ LG display. Hammer fans will be pleased as the new encoding blows away older presentations. Not to harp on the subject, but we’ll always prefer the early Hammer hits shot by Jack Asher; this film and the next year’s  The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll were still designed and lit for the Technicolor printing process.

This 4K is a big leap over the previous Blu-ray made from a Paramount transfer. It’s cleaner, brighter and sharper. Don’t judge the disc by its opening prologue / title sequence, which is entirely an optical, a generation removed. As soon as we get past the Terence Fisher credit, the image pops to its full luster.

VS gives us one 4K disc and one Blu-ray. Both contain two versions of the film, an ‘uncut, pre-censorship clothed version,’ and an alternate ‘nude Continental version’ prepared for export. The sexier cut substitutes two brief topless cutaways of Hazel Court’s Janine, talking with Bonnet as he sculpts.

German, French and Italian movies often had different versions for different languages, with regional alterations for violence, politics and especially sex content. Home video has uncovered and restored a few 1959 pictures with ‘hot’ Continental cuts. The quality replacement cutaways for Cheat Death almost match the shots around them.

Vinegar Syndrome continues with its interesting deluxe packaging — this heavy box splits on a vertical axis, showcasing a before-after artwork trick as the cover slides off. Inside is a fat insert book with essays by Adrian Smith, Jon Dear and Kieran Foster. It caused a bit of eyestrain — the designer put dark red text over black.

Kim Newman has commented on this title before; this disc gives us a new full-length audio commentary with Newman and Stephen Jones. Special Features producer Ewan Cant gives us four new featurettes. Jonathan Rigby has become a ubiquitous presence on everything Hammer these days; he handles the straightforward main historical piece. Vic Pratt hosts an overview of Terence Fisher, and Melanie Williams profiles actress Hazel Court. A surviving assistant director from the show talks about the experience in a fourth item.

The final extra, an ‘alternate censored ending’ may clear up some questions about possible ‘missing gore details’ from the finale. The censored ending is only about ten seconds shorter than the uncut ending that appears on both the clothed and unclothed cuts on the disc.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Man Who Could Cheat Death
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
New Supplements:
Audio commentary with Stephen Jones and Kim Newman
Featurette A Hideous Concoction with Jonathan Rigby (26 min)
Featurette The Man Who Could Direct Death with Vic Pratt (24 min)
Featurette Court in Session with Melanie Williams (17 min)
Featurette The Man Who Can Chat Death with third assistant director Hugh Harlow (7 min)
Alternate censored ending
40-page illustrated book with essays by Adrian Smith, Jon Dear, and Kieran Foster.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD disc and one Blu-ray disc in keep case in a slipcover, with a book in a hard box.
Reviewed: October 22, 2025
(7411chea)

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