Submitted by Iain McLachlan 
(May 26, 2004)DR BLOOD’S COFFIN
(UK 1961)
Alternate Title: FACE OF EVIL.
EastmanColour
RT: 90mins.
Pro Co: Carallan Productions.
Dir: Sidney J. Furie;
Pro: George Fowler;
Wr: Jerry Juran (=Nathan Juran); adapt: James Kelly, Peter Miller.
Phot: Stephen Dade;
Film Ed: Antony Gibbs;
Mus: Buxton Orr;
Art Dir: Scott MacGregor.
SFX: Leslie Bowie;
Make-Up: Freddie Williamson.
Camera Op: Nick Roeg.
Cast: Kieron Moore, Hazel Court, Ian Hunter, Kenneth J. Warren, Gerald C. Lawson, Fred Johnson, Paul Hardtmuth, Paul Stockman, Andy Alston.
INTRODUCTION
Dr Blood’s Coffin was the first of two Cornish-located genre productions made by director Sidney J. Furie for independent producer George Fowler to be released in 1961, the other being the rarely seen (certainly in its complete form) transformation horror The Snake Woman.
Both movies were part of the cycle of horror and science fiction movies generated by the success of Hammer Films from the mid-1950s onwards with films like Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment (55) and in the case of this work, especially Terence Fisher’s Curse of Frankenstein (57).
SYNOPSIS
A medical student at a university in Vienna is stopped from performing an illegal operation on a terminally ill man by his professor and expelled from the establishment. Some time later in the Cornish remote coastal village of Port Carren, the locals are disturbed by the disappearance of three of their number in recent days along with two break-ins at the doctor’s surgery, with medical equipment being stolen on both occasions. The doctor’s nurse is given replacement equipment by the doctor to take back to the surgery where she just misses someone stealing supplies from a refrigeration unit. Watched by the intruder, the nurse notes the missing material and searches the premises for it, before informing the doctor who then tells the detective called in from St Ives to investigate the case. The supplies stolen just then were bottles of a glucose solution used in intravenous drips. Watching from doctor’s office, the thief hears the policeman deduce that the person responsible for the recent incidents is very likely to be still in the area and hiding in a nearby cave or disused mineshaft. He decides to mount a search the next morning led by a local man with a good knowledge of the district, George Beale. The intruder then makes his way out of the surgery and across open country to the hidden entrance to a derelict mine. There he has established a make-shift laboratory where two men are seen lying on cots, apparently comatose. He attaches an intravenous drip to one of them before preparing some chloroform and filling a syringe with a clear liquid. Then he makes his way to George Beale’s house where he knocks him out with the chloroform before injecting him with the syringe. As he carries away the unconscious Beale, the assailant fails to notice that he has dropped the syringe onto the floor. The villager then joins the two other men in the mine. The next day, the doctor’s son, Peter Blood, arrives in the village after spending three years abroad studying. He introduces himself to his father’s nurse before going to meet him in his surgery, where he finds him playing chess with the local mortician. The father makes a number of suggestions about how his son should employ his new found experience and qualifications but he protests that he merely wants to relax for a few months. As the mortician leaves, he asks Peter to call on him sometime. The nurse announces that the detective has arrived and the doctor informs Peter of the events that have befallen the village recently. The policeman tells them that he has discovered an important clue in the disappearance of George Beale, a broken syringe found on the floor of the man’s bedroom. The doctor recognises it as one stolen from his premises. His son accidentally picks it up, leaving his fingerprints on it. To make amends he offers to lead a new search of the area the following morning since he is very familiar with the place from his childhood. Later George Beale is seen to be recovering from is comatose state…
REVIEW
Sidney J. Furie was one of a number of Canadian émigré filmmakers, among them Alvin Rakoff (Death Ship 80), Alan Gibson (Dracula AD 1972) and Lindsay Shonteff (The Million Eyes of Su Muru 67), who relocated to the UK during the 1950s and 1960s where they established successful careers for themselves in television and film.
Furie remains probably the best-known name from within this group, partially because of his early success with teen movies such as the Cliff Richard vehicle The Young Ones (61), but mainly because during the 1960s he developed a reputation as something of a visual pyrotechnician, employing extreme camera angles, bizarre composition and offbeat framing devices. This approach first became apparent with his breakthrough movie, the groundbreaking spy thriller The Ipcress File (65) and continued with his Hollywood debut The Appaloosa (66) and the delirious (and much troubled) Frank Sinatra action flick The Naked Runner (67).
Most of the director’s subsequent output has shown a much more conventional directorial style, but his reputation from this period still lingers. The film under review here, Dr Blood’s Coffin shows him adopting a much more restrained approach.
It was always going to be a hard call for a film to live up to the lurid delights promised by a title such as Dr Blood’s Coffin, and the makers of this film certainly seem to have largely abandoned any attempt to do so. Instead much of the more exploitative material contained in the plot, such as medical procedures, murders and kidnapping, takes place offscreen, to be replaced with a lot of footage of Kieron Moore, lurking in mine tunnels, furtively moving about the countryside or generally acting in a very suspicious manner.
For a while, it looks as if the story will be content to largely concentrate on the mystery aspects of the plot as the police, led by visiting detective Kenneth J. Warren (I, Monster 70), try and locate the person responsible for the disappearances and thefts in the small community. This, however, is abandoned before the end of the first act when it is revealed that the doctor’s son, himself a surgeon, is in fact the culprit. This solution would have been blatantly obvious to even the most unattentative viewer to the extent that some may be expecting a plot twist wherein the character has been framed by someone else for their own purposes. This could have been a potentially interesting plot twist if developed properly but the mystery element proves to be merely padding and is quickly dispensed with.
Those seeking the more visceral pleasures offered by conventional “mad doctor” movies in the style of Hammer’s output will be sorely disappointed by the fare on offer here.
There are two main operation sequences appended to the padding and expositional scenes. The first has the title character (Kieron Moore, Day of the Triffids 62) commandeering the embalming room, owned by the local mortician (Gerald C. Lawson, The Vengeance of She 67), to experiment on local man George Beale (Andy Alston) only to be interrupted by Lawson who is accidentally killed in a struggle. The other occurs during the film’s third act and has Moore resurrecting the long-dead husband of doctor’s nurse Hazel Court.
Both sequences remain determinedly low-key in style with little in the way of visual imagination (apart from the employment of the occasional tilted camera angle) from director Furie. The operation footage is decidedly coy with virtually no blood or displaced limbs and only brief glimpses of open wounds and prodding by surgical instruments.
The latter operation does feature a heart transplant with the rather good prosthetic heart provided by effects designer Leslie Bowie (The Day the Earth Caught Fire 61). The procedure is shot in such a way, however, that a lot of the time it is difficult to determine exactly what Kieron Moore’s character is actually doing.
Overall, Sidney J. Furie’s direction for the remainder of the movie can be best described as pedestrian with little in the way of style, narrative drive or dramatic action, though given the mediocrity of the material he has to work with, this is entirely suitably. It is only thanks to the efforts of his film editor Antony Gibbs (Rollerball 75) that the movie’s pacing is in any way bearable.
While the finished article remains stubbornly unambitious in almost every respect and exists as an example of a typical British “quota quickie”, there are hints that at some point in its development, possibly during its first incarnation as an American-set script by Oscar winning production designer and B-picture director Nathan Juran (20 Million Miles to Earth 57), there was some attempt to raise the sights of the project.
The completed screenplay, whose revisions by James Kelly and Peter Miller were effectively disowned by Juran, retains some semblance of an explanation of the rational between the title character’s actions. It is suggested that the character’s worldview and his attitude towards his fellow man, which have dictated the path his life has taken, are the result of his, it is implied, fraught relationship with his father (Ian Hunter. Kali Yug – La Dea della Vendetta 63), seen as very successful by himself and the local population, who wants to both impress the man and best him in the medical field.
This appears to have been compounded by the death of his mother when he was a young child. As a result of this, and probably an existing psychological predisposition, the character has developed a God complex, wherein he that those he considers weak and worthless are sacrificed to maintain the longevity of the great and the good for, he believes, the betterment of mankind. This is potentially fascinating stuff that would have added a great deal of much-needed density to the material, but unfortunately it is not developed in any way with the dramatic conflict promised by the father/son relationship, even in its most uncomplicated form, coming to nothing. Matters are not helped by the director’s decision to have the scenes involving these two characters underplayed by the performers, resulting in little or no dramatic impact.
Another potentially fascinating element still extant within the screenplay is the conflict between the surgeon’s extreme form of humanism and belief in the power of faith as represented by the doctor’s nurse played by Hazel Court (The Premature Burial 62). Following the death of her husband three years previously, Court has sought solace in religion, her belief in the power of faith easily matching Moore’s blind conviction that science and his ability to manipulate is a solution to mankind’s ills. The reanimation of the nurse’s late spouse at the film’s climax is therefore an attempt to drive home a point about control. The arguments between the two characters are relatively well scripted and Hazel Court and Kieron Moore inject some intensity into their scenes together that is largely absent from the rest of the picture.
Either or both of these concepts could have provided the basis for a much stronger, more ambitious piece of work. Instead they remain reminders of a wasted opportunity and illustrate why even among British potboilers of the time, Dr Blood’s Coffin is considered a minor and largely neglected piece of filmmaking.
Of course it is very rare for even the most undistinguished piece of cinema not to have some redeeming qualities and in the case of this film, there are some minor compensations.
The most obvious asset that Sidney J. Furie’s film possesses is the striking Cornish coastal setting where the exteriors for the film were shot. Brought vividly to life by cinematographer Stephen Dade (City Under the Sea 65) this rugged landscape, with its beaches, rocky shores and abandoned tin mines lend the film a unique visual quality that is probably its single most distinctive feature.
Also notable is a very effective score by Buxton Orr (Corridors of Blood 58), which actually succeeds in making a number of sequences, such as the climactic operation on Court’s deceased husband, seem much more exciting than they actually are.
If, overall, director Furie has produced a thoroughly mediocre work, he still occasionally attempts to raise the level of his game. Among the more notable sequences that he has contributed are a distinctly chilly one where the title character reveals his fantasy about being entombed forever within a tin mine with Court’s character, just like the Egyptian kings and queens he read about as a boy, the vigorously handled fight between Court’s resurrected husband (Paul Stockman, The Skull 65) and the surgeon frantically searching for an escapee from his laboratory, here the managing to generate some mild tension from otherwise uninspiring material.
On the rare occasion that Dr Blood’s Coffin is reviewed in any detail, criticism is often levelled at the performance of Kieron Moore (Day of the Triffids 63) as the title character, mainly because of the detached manner in which he tackles the role. While this approach may harm some scenes by reducing the dramatic impact that more overt histrionics might allow, it is entirely appropriate whose relationship with the rest of humanity is so distorted that he has in effect, removed himself from it.
As presented in this production, Moore’s character is a twisted amalgam of Peter Cushing’s versions of Frankenstein found in Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein and his direct sequel The Revenge of Frankenstein (58), that of the intellectual fascist and the badly misguided idealist. The allusion to the Hammer works is underlined by the fact that at least four of the performers in Dr Blood’s Coffin, including Hazel Court (whose first major success was the earlier Fisher work), had featured roles in one or the other of these films.
In keeping with the low-key nature of the rest of the film, Furie’s work finishes not with the conflagration considered de rigueur in this genre, but rather Moore being strangled by the reanimated Stockman, who himself is overcome by gas fumes. The make-up for the mouldy, rotting corpse by Freddie Williamson (Blue Blood 73) is actually quite effective in a crude way,
Camera operator Nick Roeg later went on to become a gifted cinematographer in his own right, with films like Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death (64) and Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (66) to his credit, before embarking on a career as a director whose works included the modern classic Don’t’ Look Now (73) and The Witches (90).
©Iain McLachlan 2004
Chroma-Noize cult movie reviews: www.geocities.com/bigfatpav2000
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(6 ratings)