Rent Four Sided Triangle (1953)

Springing a Surprise - Four Sided Triangle review by CH

With its first scene well-nigh a clone of Went the Day Well? - a narrator recollects events against shots of a village, a pub, a manor house - Four-Sided Triangle (1953) bodes well. An early Hammer production, its centrepiece, The Reproducer, makes a 3-D printer appear tame. Two young men have created a device which can makes copies of anything, even the woman for whom they share affections, Barbara Payton. She brings this film such brio as it has; tragically, it marked a bright spot in a life which became ever dimmer, until her early death in 1967. At only seventy-five minutes, it drags, sunk by explication - and, unlike those in charge of The Reproducer, one has no reluctance to press the stop button.

So why allot the disc four stars? There is a bonus feature, The Right Person (1954). Curiosity is well rewarded. For one thing, it is the first script by Philip Mackie, an ever-dependable television writer. It springs a surprise early on. The opening scene is in garish colour and takes in some of Copenhagen. What's more, it is filmed in Cinemascope. It feels as though the ground is being set for an epic chase. But no, everything cuts to the hotel room in which the newly-married Mrs. Jorgensen (Margo Lorenz, who also died young) puts down her bags after a hard day's shopping and awaits her husband, who should have been back by then, ready for dinner after a drink or two. Instead there arrives a man, insistent on waiting for him. Douglas Wilmer is brilliant at depicting an enigma who is, naturally enough, unwilling to give away too much about wartime bonds and fractures.

Tensions and doubts grow, so much that Mrs Jorgensen knocks back the national drink in one - several times..

To say anymore would be unfair, except that, amazingly, all this fills only twenty-five minutes: neither too little nor too much.

The Right Person had first been shown, with a different cast and in black and white, the year before on the BBC. We need more films which make good use of a neat idea rather than "opening it out", a phrase redolent of skin being pulled apart for an operation. The Right Person does not need surgery: it is now sixty-five years old and in perfect health.