THE MAN WHO FINALLY
DIED. A White Cross Production distributed by
British Lions Ltd., Magna Film Distributors. United Kingdom-Germany, 1962. 1
hour 36 minutes. Aspect ratio 2.35:1
Director:
Quentin Lawrence. Screenplay: Lewis Greifer, Louis Marks. Story: Lewis Greifer.
Cinematography: Stephen Dade. Music: Philip Green. Producer: Norman Williams. CAST: Stanley Baker (Joe Newman/Joachim
Deutsch), Mai Zetterling (Lisa Deutsch), Peter Cushing (Dr. Peter von Brecht),
Nigel Green (Hirsch), Eric Portman (Inspector Hofmeister), Niall MacGinnis
(Brenner), Georgina Ward (Maria)
Adapted
from a 1959 TV mini-series, The Man Who
Finally Died is a competently made early '60s British mystery yarn that draws upon the
building blocks of both Cold War espionage thriller and film noir. Jazz musician Joe Newman (Stanley Baker) gets
a call from a German claiming to be Kurt Deutsch, his father who had supposedly
died during the war, while in Königsbaden, a town in Bavaria, a hearse bearing
the name of "Kurt Deutsch" is shown to be driven over the
piazza. Joe decides to drop in at Königsbaden
to find out what the heck is really going on, but is immediately trailed by a
cop (Nigel Green), and obstructed by his father's new wife Lisa (Mai Zetterling)
and her adviser cum family doctor von
Brecht (Peter Cushing). He is convinced that there is a conspiracy afoot,
possibly involving the local police, to legally keep Kurt deceased, all the
while trying to ship him off somewhere.
He trusts neither Lisa nor von Brecht, and has a tense conversation with
the latter regarding the latter's Nazi affiliation. Is a Neo-Nazi cabal responsible for his
father's disappearance? Or was he a
victim of a much more prosaic crime, aimed at collecting one million Deutsch
Marks of life insurance payment, as the suave, gun-toting insurance
investigator Brenner (Niall MacGinnis, perhaps best known as the evil Dr.
Karswell in Curse of the Demon
[1957]) tells Joe?
Like
the character of Kurt Deutsch, the film changes identity in the latter third,
dropping film noir affectations and turning into a more straightforward Cold
War thriller, ideologically aligned with the notion of postwar West Germany as
a staunch ally of the United Kingdom against the dastardly Soviet Union. Still, the film maintains a reasonably complex
view of major characters: both Cushing and MacGinnis play with audience
expectations, keeping us unsure where their real allegiances lie. Stanley Baker cuts a likeable hero and conveys
well the moral conundrum of a man trying to expose the truth but in the process
possibly bringing danger to more than one lives, while suitably emotional and
bull-headed when required. The actors
playing police are somewhat disadvantaged by their stilted German accent,
although the always reliable Nigel Green serves as a nicely droll Greek chorus
to the proceedings.
The Man Who Finally
Died is filmed in
the widescreen ratio by Stephen Dade (Nights of the Round Table [1953]). The iTV stalwart Quentin
Lawrence's direction is not terribly dynamic but the scope visuals are
otherwise quite attractive. The mono
soundtrack features a harpsichord-inflected, effective score composed by Philip
Green (one of Basil Dearden's regular collaborators, for instance, in Sapphire [1959]).
DVD Presentation:
Network/Studio
Canal. The British Film Series. PAL Region 2. Video: Widescreen 2.35:1. Audio:
English Mono. No subtitles. Supplements:
Image Gallery, Promotional Materials in PDF.
Street Date: July 1, 2013.
Another
item in the Studio Canal and Network's British Film series, The Man Who Finally Died seems to have
received a brand-new HD transfer. I am
not certain why this particular title has not been issued as a Blu Ray, but the
image is sparkling clean, with perhaps a bit of overactive digital cleansing
at work and/or boosted contrast. The
details are sharp and black levels are rich and deep. No CinemaScope distortions are noticeable
either.
The
audio is also quite good given the inherent limitations, preferring Green's
suspenseful music score to the sound effects, some of which (such as the impact
of punches thrown by Joe) are not perfectly registered. The unattractive DVD cover seems to have been
cobbled together from elements of the original poster and still photos of Baker
and Ward, although the original poster is not something to write home about
either. Rather intelligent if
conventional, and buttressed by solid performances by genre experts such as
Baker, Cushing, MacGinnis and Green, The
Man Who Finally Died is recommended to the fans of classic Cold War/spy
films as well as those of the above-mentioned British actors.
