Classic Horrors Club

The Man Who Finally Died (1963) completes a trilogy of films Peter Cushing made for British Lion in the early 1960s. However, it comes at the end of 10 films sandwiched between it and Suspect three years earlier. So prolific was the actor that you’d never have known that, according to author Jonathan Rigby, he was actually unemployed for 18 months during this period of his career.

The film comes after a small group of films in which Cushing stepped away from horror and toward adventure: Sword of Sherwood Forest, The Hellfire Club, and Fury at Smugglers’ Bay. He was back at Hammer for Cash on Demand and Night Creatures before making The Man Who Finally Died, which is neither horror nor adventure. Like the other British Lion films, his role was supporting, but Cushing shined nonetheless.

Here he’s a chess piece in a fairly complicated plot of post-World War II intrigue. I never knew what to think of his character, Dr. Peter von Brecht. Was he a good guy or a bad guy, someone doing bad things for good reasons or doing good things to disguise his true motives? His behavior could indicate either, but we learn definitively at the end which it’s going to be, and it wasn’t the one I expected. 

The star of The Man Who Finally Died is Stanley Baker, who plays Joe Newman, whose father is/was the titular character. The action gets rolling when he’s summoned to his home town to meet with the father he’s assumed died 20 years ago. Just before he arrives, a funeral procession rolls through town with his father’s name on the side of the coffin. Did he just die? If so, where’s he been? 

It’s a good mystery, but the solution is wrapped inside its trappings of drama and history instead of the spooky or supernatural that I prefer. Nevertheless, the ending is quite exciting, taking place on where else but a speeding train. Baker is good as the lead. Not only does he look like a young Sean Connery if you’re squinting at him through the fog, but his character finds himself in Bond-like situations.

It’s been fun watching Cushing raise the quality of these three British Lion productions in the scenes in which he appears. It’s after this that he embraced the genre beginning with The Evil of Frankenstein a year later. We’ll  jump ahead a decade next time to look at two other curiosities, Bloodsuckers and Tender Dracula. I’m not sure how promising they sound, but it doesn’t matter… Peter Cushing is in them.