When I refer to British director Terence Fisher as “the poor man’s Hitchcock,” I do not mean that in a disparaging way.
I mean it as a compliment, for while Fisher made his movies pretty much the way Hitchcock did, he never had the kind of budgets that Hitch had in America. Terence Fisher made all but one of his 50 movies in England over a period of 25 years (1947-1972). Thirty-seven of them were for the same studio.
That studio was Hammer Films and Fisher helmed their most successful movies during the late 1950s and early 1960s. These movies turned Hammer into an international phenomenon and made them very successful financially. This despite the fact (or perhaps because of it) that Fisher’s movies were roundly condemned upon their release as being “violent, vulgar, and vomit inducing.”
Today it’s hard to imagine what all the fuss was about as movies have gone way beyond anything to be found in Fisher’s work. Now they are “classics” that can be appreciated for their superb craftsmanship and for the performances of their primary stars, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.
Terence Fisher was born in 1904 and died in 1980. He began in the British film industry when Hitchcock was England’s number one director. He started off in menial positions but quickly worked his way up to becoming a film editor. He made his first film in 1947 and was finally given a chance to direct something of substance in 1949.
So Long at the Fair (1949) starring Jean Simmons and Dirk Bogarde was set during the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and it showed his flair for handling a period setting. The film impressed Hammer enough to hire him. They put him to work grinding out a series of British-style film noirs using fading, or up-and-coming American stars.
In 1953 he made his first masterpiece for Hammer, a doomed love story with a science fiction background called The Four Sided Triangle about a scientist cloning the woman he loves because she loves someone else. This showed that Fisher could handle a laboratory setting which was essential for whoever would direct the planned remake of Universal’s Frankenstein. Hammer had recently scored with a successful series of sci-fi thrillers which tied up their other directors so Fisher was free to helm The Curse of Frankenstein.
Viewing it from the start as a Gothic fairy tale, Fisher made sure that the film’s look would be artistic as opposed to realistic. The acting was theatrical, the lighting operatic, the Technicolor vivid with a dominant use of primary colors, the camerawork fluid, and then the whole thing was tightly edited (in the camera) for maximum impact. The success was immediate and overwhelming. Shot on a budget of less than $300,000, Curse grossed an astounding $8 million worldwide, and this was in 1957. Hammer Films was off and running.
They went to work adapting all of Universal’s classic monsters and Terence Fisher directed them all. Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), and The Phantom of the Opera (1962). All were very successful except for Phantom which was the first of Hammer’s films to lose money. This cost Fisher his position as the number one director at Hammer. After making 31 films in 10 years for the company, he would only make 6 in the next 8, retiring for good in 1974.
A serious accident in 1968 (he was struck by a car while crossing the street after the premiere of The Devil Rides Out) certainly had its effect on him, but so did the changing times. That same year Rosemary’s Baby and the original Night of the Living Dead were released and Hammer Horror was now seen as tame and outdated. The Exorcist (1973) was the final nail in the coffin.
In order to compete, Hammer tried exchanging the pre-Raphaelite look for the Playboy approach but it was too late. Fisher’s last two films reflected this change. The “good shall prevail but at a cost” mantra from his earlier films was now replaced by a bleak nihilism that can be seen in Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (1969).
Happily, he did live long enough to see his films, which had gone from being critically reviled to being considered “dull and hopelessly old-fashioned.” They become regarded as prime examples of supreme craftsmanship on a modest budget and studied as examples of how to use the various tools of moviemaking to enhance the story you are telling.
Fisher may be no Hitchcock, but few have succeeded in capturing such a consistent look in their films or in consistently achieving what they set out to do.