Starring Barbara Payton, James Hayter, Stephen Murray, John Van Eyssen, Percy Marmont
Directed by Terence Fisher
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)
A pair of childhood friends grow up to become scientists and perfect a duplicating machine, but when one of them marries the woman the other also loves, the rejected one aims to duplicate her.
I'm very fond of this picture, a science fiction effort made by Fisher for Hammer Films before their success in horror movies, and it has an excellent concept and script adapted for the screen by Fisher and Paul Tabori from a novel by William F. Temple. The photography by Reginald Wyer is crisp and features some very beautiful closeups of the lovely Payton, and the score by Malcolm Arnold has the proper flourishes during the well-directed laboratory scenes, in which Fisher shows the prowess he would bring to Hammer's Frankenstein films. The only thing that holds the picture back in my opinion from being a complete success is some visual representation of the emotion Payton's character has for Van Eyssen's as it becomes critical to the story in the film's latter half. I'm not sure if this is due to Payton's range as an actress or the lack of romantic clinches in the movie, but an improvement in this regard would have just completely sold me on the film. Nevertheless, it's still a fine production and a quality early effort by Fisher.
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