Terence Fisher's «Four Sided Triangle» concludes in a conciliatory fashion, after order has been temporarily altered by human forces, with the complete extermination of the man who attempted to change social order and the odd monstrosity that he created. It is not a surprising reactionary ending to a story told by the doctor of Howdean, a township ruled by the Grant manor for fifteen generations. On the contrary, it is an early, consistent ending from Hammer Film, a company that would later specialize in social, sexual and cultural confrontations of British mores. It fittingly starts and ends in a moralist tone, respectively quoting the Ecclesiastes and Ralph Waldo Emerson's texts about God, uprightness, joy, power and man's inventions. As the William F. Temple novel on which it is based, this screen adaptation is also narrated by the town's physician Dr. Harvey who tells the story of three friends he knows since they were kids, who form a love triangle as grownups: Robin Grant is the squire's sole heir ("solid, dependable and conscientious", according to the doctor, played by 31-year old John van Eyssen), poor Bill Leggett is the only child of the village's drunkard ("wild and impetuous"… but a "prodigy", played by Stephen Murray, 41), and Lena Maitland is apparently the daughter of an American woman (the "queen of Bill's dreams", played by American actress Barbara Payton, 26). The two men have become "brilliant scientist" who have created a machine that duplicates everything (including humans), and Lena has returned from America after failed attempts to become an artist of any sort. The woman eventually marries the rich heir, to the despair of lovesick Bill who, in turn, creates Helen, Lena's duplicate, to compensate his urges, with tragic consequences for him and the clone who, as a perfect copy of the original, also loves Robin. Simply put, this is a tale of the fittest, the richest and the youngest, sanctified by the Bible and Emerson. To be fair Fisher does quite well with this oddity, making it melodramatic and scary at turns, and look attractive in spite of its low budget. Fisher and Paul Tabori took a lot of screen time to elaborate the love aspects of the story, leaving little space to the Frankenstein tale. Four years later, as we all know, Fisher would dedicate a whole film to that story with better results and obtain celebrity (along with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee) with "The Curse of Frankenstein".

OK, I admit that there are some aspects of this film that are actually pretty good. The male actors are likable and charming (if maybe somewhat mannered and "stagey" in their performances). Barbara Payton is reasonably hot and is a much better actress than, say, Mamie Van Doren. Some of the photography and lighting and sets are really good. And the central plot idea has some resonance...who can't identify with the wish to recapture the love that got away? Unfortunately, the screenplay's structure is a mess (beware of any film that opens up with this kind of portentous narration). And it also requires that the characters act like morons. You can get away with characters this dense and unreflective if you are doing a satire. Robert Sheckley or R.A. Lafferty would have done wonderful things with this material. But "4ST" plays things completely straight...and takes 20 minutes too long to get to the good parts.I think this is one of those cases where the material just got away from the director and wouldn't pull together no matter what they did in editing and post-production. Or maybe the director (who went on to do many of Hammer's best regarded films) just needed a lurid horror element in his films to distract the audience from his weaknesses with more straight forward dramatic material. It may be that once he had Dracula to play with, he was working with material more suited to his strengths as a director.I gave this one an extra star because I am sure that audiences back then (with 50 years less movie watching backlog) probably enjoyed this more than I did, and it is too well made to be ranked with 3 star-and-below AIP and Roger Corman dumps from the same era. After all, even mediocre British movies of that period have a certain dignity and craftsmanship that exploitation and genre directors could never hope to get.

Seeing this movie for the second time, I was struck by how clearly it anticipates Hammer's later Frankenstein films. The relationship of the two scientists, with one more eager than the other to pursue bolder experiments, the look of the laboratory, even specific camera angles of Bill at work, all foreshadow Curse of Frankensetin some four years later.One can see Terence Fisher's style taking shape, though the complete Hammer atmosphere has yet to be established. A major aspect is the seriousness with which the storyline and characters are enacted. Fisher remarked once that when they were filming Curse of Frankenstein, it was tempting at first to do it almost tongue in cheek, but he realized that the more serious the approach, the better it would work in the long run. This film uses that same serious attitude to make the fantastic story seem plausible. The actors make their characters completely believable, no matter how outlandish the plot gets.This is a minor but fascinating exercise in the development of the Hammer legacy, and well worth seeing for anyone interested in Fifties British science fiction.

********SPOILERS***********Some suspense but mostly melodrama in this story of the "duplicator" -- a device which really lives up to its name! But -- watch out! -- 2 Barbara Paytons might not be better than one! Solid but acting below anyone's par. Not as good as "Quatermass" but a step in a good direction for Hammer. Why did B. Payton's character give that noir kind of speech and then turn out to be such an idiot? Just another example of screenwriters trying to have their cake and eat it too, I guess.