Four Sided Triangle
Look, no-one expects perfection when you do something for the very first time, what’s important is to learn from it, right? Although for God’s sake, make sure you’re learning stuff that will be useful later. Because of course you’ll discover you’re hopeless, doomed to fail, and life is so unfair; but that’s not very useful is it? Plus this is what anyone discovers when they try and make anything; the perils of the creative process and whatnot. However, if you’re paying attention, you can also learn what will make things better the next time you try. So when you’re a film studio making your first bit of genre cinema, for example, you will have the chance to figure out how to make much better films later on. Especially when your early efforts are unlikely to become cinematic classics. You must learn the right lessons though because it’s phenomenally easy to go off in the wrong direction; heading down the garden path that only leads to a compost heap, a shopping trolley and a lost, abandoned jazz mag, faded by the rain.
So when Hammer made their first sci-fi ‘Four Sided Triangle’, they could easily have come away from it thinking - making movies with disgraced Hollywood stars, where absolutely everything is explained in voice-over seems easy enough, let’s do that! Instead they realized that all you need to tell a shocking and tragic story of a scientist gone mad is a barn, a pile of second-hand lab equipment, and a whole lot of moody lighting. Because Four Sided Triangle is more of a curiosity than, you know, an actual film. But there are enough moments where the lab equipment is humming, the orchestral score is crescendo-ing, and the horrified faces of onlookers are lit up like ghosts forced to watch their own demise, that you think ‘this is a Hammer film alright’. - and all in a story that will become familiar, of brilliant men inhabiting rickety buildings in unimportant villages; compelled towards their own destruction while the ones they love can, at best, only watch helplessly, and, at worst, be dragged down into the whirlpool of their fated madness and doom.
What’s remarkable is that Hammer were able to take all this from the movie, and not the other stuff.
The female lead left Hollywood in disgrace - after she cheated on her husband with the same boyfriend who had beaten him up when he was her fiance - and so was forced to work for cheap because no-one else would hire her. Now, there’s no doubt that she’s got what the others in the movie don’t, a real film star’s charisma but instead of going out and finding more disgraced Hollywood stars to lure to the English countryside for a can of beans and their name on a poster, instead Hammer went out and found relative unknowns from England who had the same magnetism, but none of the baggage; they learned it was about the charisma, not the name.
And the kindly old Doctor who is helpless to prevent the unfolding tragedy is a great character, and one that Hammer were right to use again and again. What’s interesting in this movie though is that he’s completely unbelievable and narratively incoherent. He’s forever saying things like ‘I won’t help you’, before helping them in the next scene with no explanation for the change of heart. Or saying ‘there was nothing I could do’ except, of course, telling the people the bad idea was happening to, that this was a bad idea. But again, what’s great is that they didn’t ditch the character, just the narrative inconsistencies. They understood that these stories are destined to go badly, that characters are allowed to warn other characters that this is all a terrible idea, because most people, and especially mad scientists, are really good at ignoring advice.
Hammer also learned that not everyone has to be nice to be sympathetic. The biggest problem with Four Sided Triangle is that the main narrative plot point, the mad scientist cloning the woman he loves because the real one loves his best mate, is so evidently an absolutely terrible idea that no-one with an even passing acquaintance with sanity would ever, ever agree to it. Unfortunately, at this point in their understanding of these sorts of movies, they feel like everyone needs to be nice to be liked by the audience or evil to be hated. And because they want the mad scientist to be sympathetic they have everyone either willingly go through with this galactically stupid idea or be completely ignorant of it. However, there is a crucial difference between doing stupid things because you are compelled to by love or greed or hubris, and doing them just because the film needs you to. And Hammer figured out which was which, and had no problem in the future putting deeply troubled agents of pure destruction in leading roles, without them losing an ounce of sympathy.
It is an extraordinary line you can draw from Four Sided Triangle to what would become Hammer Horror movies. It could have gone so differently, and they could have carried on making the same mistakes; which is how most of us spend our lives, let’s face it. But instead they learned, they grew, and came to understand that if you make the right choice, you can change your world. Speaking of which…
Another pint?
