Four Sided Triangle (Terence Fisher, 1953)

Programme note on Terence Fisher's 1953 film, Four Sided Triangle, whose restoration premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato 2025.

One of the most distinctive British directors to emerge in the 1950s, Terence Fisher built a cinematic world around the Frankenstein syndrome—duplication through irresponsible science. In this key manifestation of that theme, Freud, the Holy Scriptures, and pulp literature form an unholy alliance. Based on a 1949 novel by William F. Temple, the film is delivered directly to the camera and told in flashback, the latter being a favourite device of Fisher’s in the 1950s. It follows two Cambridge graduates who build a replication machine. When the woman they both love—American blonde Barbara Payton—chooses one of them, the other scientist clones her. Of course, the experiment goes horribly wrong. Early Fisher is a melodrama of extremes, with a perverse depiction of the violence inherent in loving too much, loving unknowingly, loving in the dark.

The usual Cold War concerns prevalent in American sci-fi films of the '50s are not relevant here. The British were more preoccupied with the (in)humanist questions raised by new science than with its political or hysterical implications. Yet, made just a year after the UK developed its own atomic bomb, Four Sided Triangle inevitably conveys a sense of post-Oppenheimer angst.

Fisher’s obsessive attention to machines’ dials and buttons, and bodies’ electrophysiology —which connect the world of knowledge to the unknown—reveals the exhilaration of rebirth, but also a Britain that has acquired unwarranted godly powers. Both a Christian scientist and a voyeur, Fisher takes on the task of showing the shortcut from the physical to the metaphysical. A title card at the end of the film quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.” Fisher seems to be having both. That’s what Hammer films were for. – Ehsan Khoshbakht