Four Sided Triangle: Will the Real Terence Fisher Please Stand Up?
Warning: This piece contains spoilers for Four Sided Triangle (1953). As a 4K restoration of the film is available to pre-order now, reader discretion (or indiscretion) is advised…
There’s a curious ambiguity to Terence Fisher. A patchwork of contradictions that the director himself seemed to delight in stitching together. So how can Four Sided Triangle help us decode the man once hailed as ‘the master of the macabre’?
An unpretentious filmmaker, Fisher sometimes claimed that studios employed him to simply make movies that would make money. Even late into his career, he called himself a ‘director for hire’ and suggested his job was to take the screenplay he was handed and commit it to celluloid, and when interviewers delved into his directorial approach he became bluntly sceptical of what he termed ‘these analytical questions’.
He used that phrase during a Q&A in the mid-70s, but the same session saw him state that his two early ambitions were ‘…to know film craft and film art to its full potential’. The latter aspiration was passed off as an afterthought and the interviewer doesn’t pursue it. But it’s as though Terence Fisher had momentarily shown his hand. He wanted to film art to its full potential, indicating he was a more thoughtful, more driven, more cerebral director than he was given credit for by most critics and very possibly, himself.
His mantra was the script represented his ‘Bible’, but in in this case of Four Sided Triangle, he co-wrote the Bible, meaning this early Hammer sci-fi thriller stands as an almost unique case study into how he wanted to achieve his aims.
Note the open door, inviting us in…
The film is based on William F. Temple’s 1949 novel, Four-Sided Triangle, which Temple developed from his novelette, The 4-Sided Triangle, first published in the November, 1939 issue of Amazing Stories. It’s interesting to note the changes that Fisher and his co-writer, Paul Tabori, made to Temple’s original plotline. Some of the tweaks made to the book’s closing stages make sense in terms of pacing and what kind of storytelling works well on screen, but it’s the early shifts that throw a fascinating light onto Fisher’s preferences.
The book begins with the promise of an invention that will radically change the world and we soon meet Bill (at this point a youngster) via his father figure, the dependable Doctor Harvey. But he’s no ordinary lad – he’s a ‘Prodigy’, whom the physician compares to a ‘youthful Newton, possibly an embryo Galileo or Archimedes’.
We’re introduced to Robin separately (his affluent background is stressed) and when we finally meet Lena she’s in her twenties and is recovering from an attempt to take her own life. Temple is focussing on what makes his three central charters exceptional. What distinguishes them from the norm.
A beautifully lit moment as the triangle buckles, ever so slightly…
Cleverly, Fisher rejects this approach and we meet them as three very ordinary children, playing knights in a barn located within a idealised village. Each of the young people is presented as the junior equivalent of an ‘everyman’ figure, a conceit that draws us into the characters and their lives. When Robin bests Bill in their ‘pretend’ fight and Lena crowns him the victor, we sense this single, simple act could have far-reaching consequences, but it remains a relatable set-up for the trio.
The makeshift costumes the kids wear, their improvised swords and shields and the entire masquerade gives the opening a fairytale quality and a sense of fantasy that weaves in and out of the story that follows.
It’s impossible not to be reminded of Fisher’s later thoughts on what made Hammer’s most famous movies so successful. ‘The films are all fantasy,’ he revealed. ‘I always set them in a fairytale land, far removed from the familiar and the present.’ It could be argued that Four Sided Triangle was his first work to try this approach and its success could well have persuaded him to repeat the overall premise throughout his Hammer masterpieces.
Bill (Stephen Murray) and Robin (John Van Eyssen) in the lab.
Many of the film’s visuals also presage his better known output. There’s an authenticity to his character’s emotions, reactions and flaws, and even the science behind Bill and Robin’s discovery has a hokey logic to it. But the laboratory eschews commonsense, happily trading it for visual effectiveness.
Within the world of Four Sided Triangle, the lab where the century’s greatest scientific achievement has been developed, is housed in a small, dimly lit shack. The real-life accoutrements and conditions are set aside for an eye-catching mixture of equipment, half Hans Zarkov, half Victor Frankenstein.
Under laboratory conditions: Stephen Murray and Barbara Payton.
It may lack verisimilitude, yet it looks intriguing and personal, further enforcing the notion this is Bill, Robin and Lena’s story and the subplots about their work benefiting the entire planet are entirely incidental. Fisher went on to recreate versions of this work space many times with Hammer, usually with a deluded scientist scampering from one test tube to another. But here is the original – striking, absurd and absorbing in equal measures.
The inferno that later engulfs the lab, the idea of artificially creating a bride and the wider misuse of science by a gifted but misguided genius are amongst several other elements that will be echoed in Fisher’s later saga of Frankenstein.
A couple in a Hammer film, relaxing by a cliff-edge. What could possibly go wrong?
Aside from the laboratory, Four Sided Triangle is crammed with many other terrific visuals. A single shot of Bill and Helen on their ‘honeymoon’ is a smart indication of where both characters lie. The couple are perched by the coast. Bill is a picture of hubris and contentment; Lena a mass of anxiety and helplessness. And beside them both – the cliff-edge. Beyond it, the sea, and like sirens calling doomed mariners to a watery death, so the lure of the crashing waves will prove too much for Lena. Watching it, we don’t need dialogue. Lena’s tragedy is artfully and painfully painted. The scene lasts for less than 30 seconds but emerges as one of the movie’s most memorable and chilling passages.
Terence Fisher (left) goofing around with Guy Middleton during the shoot for Marry Me (1947).
It's easy to overlook that Fisher was an experienced, skilled director long before he was at the helm for The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and certainly before he adapted Temple’s most famous novel. Martin Scorsese selected two of his earlier works in a list of 50 British films that influenced him, and Fisher’s flair and visual panache were already rescuing certain movies from their pedestrian scripts.
Four Sided Triangle offers a fascinating snapshot of where Terence Fisher stood in the early 50s. At ease with horror, although it’s delivered with a veneer of fantasy. Visuals are strong and the stories remain personal tales, despite the larger implications of what central characters are setting out to achieve.
‘And his kissing is as full of sanctity as the touch of holy bread…’
Terence Fisher never intended to define Hammer’s heritage of horror, but his work on this and other early thrillers can be viewed, in crude terms, as the groundwork for that later achievement. And aside from his ability to translate a screenplay into a vivid, engaging film, his dependability and the fact that actors loved working with him were also part of the reason he became central to the ‘Hammer family’.
In the early 2000s, for instance, Christpher Lee observed that working with Fisher was hugely enjoyable. He stressed the director’s professional attitude and eye for detail, but noted that filmmaking was a joyous process when under Fisher’s friendly guidance. ‘Terence was a dear… We had a lot of fun,’ he recalled, adding mournfully, ‘That barely exists these days.’
Today, it’s hard to believe Fisher’s modest assertions about his craft and capabilities. He’s recognised as one of the greats and it’s to be hoped that in a small way, the restoration of Four Sided Triangle will further enhance his reputation.
Incidentally, when asked what Fisher himself would have thought about his reappraisal and being acknowledged as an auteur, Christopher Lee beamed. ‘He’d have laughed…’ he replied. ‘He’d have laughed!’
Find out more about Hammer’s restoration and release of Fisher’s Four Sided Triangle.
