The Man in Half Moon Street – review

Director: Ralph Murphy

Release date: 1945

Contains spoilers

I mentioned this film, having seen it on a vampire filmography, when I looked at Hammer’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death. The Hammer film is a remake and I looked at it as a ‘Vamp or Not?’ Now, when I did, my opinion on medical youth/beauty extension films was quite strict and I considered it 'Not Vamp'. That said I also considered the same for Atom Age Vampire. I have since revisited AAV and reconsidered my position. I think I owe the same to the Hammer remake of this in the near future.

Half Moon Street

This film starts with a foggy Thames and Big Ben chiming, we are in an atmospheric London and the film relies more on drawing room drama, with a touch of detective film, than the horror it might have been. The camera goes to Half Moon Street and the padlocked door to the house of Dr Julian Karell (Nils Asther) and a voiceover asks about him. The film then goes to various characters we’ll meet in the film, interviewed like talking heads, who call him a fine scientist, a cold-blooded killer and a man “who dared more than mortal man ever dared”. The last was from a woman, Eve (Helen Walker).

Karell and Eve

The film jumps back in time. Karell comes through a gate and across a garden into a room where Eve is playing piano. He has approached the house from the back gate as he heard her playing and wanted to see her before meeting her guests. It becomes clear that he has lost track of time – believing it May when it is in mid-June and his loss of time is put down to being lost in the act of creating her portrait, which she has sat for through May. That day there is a party for its unveiling.

Helen Walker as Eve

They go through. Karell has never met her father, Sir Humphrey (Edmund Breon, The Thing from Another World) who correctly suspects his daughter has fallen for the “dauber” and who is talking to his physician Dr Henry Latimer (Paul Cavanagh). Henry has tried, in vain, to woo Eve. Lady Minerva Aldergate (Aminta Dyne) wants to meet Karell and swears he has a look of Julian Le Strange – his grandfather he says. But, as he speaks to her, he tells her of her illicit meeting with Le Strange as though he had been there. Then he tells her that his grandfather had, towards his end, spoken in detail of his misadventures. Returning to Eve he spins a different story, saying his grandfather had died before he was born.

chemical

The portrait is revealed and then he and Eve sneak off to be alone and he tells her that he won’t see her for a while. He explains that he is being visited by Dr. Kurt van Bruecken (Reinhold Schünzel), a world-renowned surgeon, and they will be working on an experiment that will benefit humanity. She does pick up on a missed undertone in the conversation, and asks him direct if he was going to ask her to marry him, which he affirms. There is a phone call and he rushes home; van Bruecken is delayed. He makes himself a chemical drink from a glowing flask.

greeting van Bruecken

As the film progresses, he saves a young medical student (Morton Lowry) from suicide in the Thames due to gambling debts and it is clear he had been watching the student, talks him into agreeing to helping with an experiment (using van Bruecken’s name and the lure of £2000) but then keeps him locked up and drugged. Van Bruecken is visibly an old man but they are the same age – they mastered a gland transplant that can maintain youth but it has a ten-year lifespan. They have done this six times and each time the young man (it is a young gland exchanged to the old man) has died. This is our vampiric bit, taking a gland from a victim that gives youth but kills the donor. He is convinced he has developed new chemicals that will mean the donor does not die.

Karell's notes

The problem is van Bruecken has had a stroke and can no longer operate but, more so, he is no longer convinced that what they are doing benefits humanity either, rather it benefits Karell only. Henry and Sir Humphrey are looking for dirt on Karell and manage to get his fingerprint. It matches that of a murderer in an unsolved crime, committed decades before and the first of six murders suspected by the same man (fingerprints were found only once) who kills every ten years – there is scepticism, of course, at the theory that the murderer could be the much too young Karell. However, Scotland Yard do get on the case.

rapidly aging

We don’t see a “harvest” but we do get a death (that is probably accidental and has a cracking corpse disposal scene) and we also get a rapid aging scene as the old transplant finally fails. Given the apparent low budget and the date of the film, the aging scene is surprisingly effective. As a film, this won’t set the world on fire (or it would have been more readily available over recent years) but it is a competent piece. The opening commentary on Karell, of course, makes us realise that he is unlikely to get away with it but it is a pleasant enough ride to the outcome. Much less horror than Hammer’s remake (which, again, I do need to revisit) but a solid 5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK