Four Sided Triangle (Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, April 22) my husband Charles and I watched a 1953 film from Hammer Films (under their alternate “Exclusive Films” identity) that turned out to be surprisingly good: a science-fiction thriller called Four Sided Triangle. (Note the punctuation: no “The” in front of it and no hyphen between “Four” and “Sided,” though the 1949 novel by British science-fiction writer William F. Temple on which it was based was published as Four-Sided Triangle and at the start of the print we were watching was a British Board of Film Censors certificate giving the film’s title as The Four Sided Triangle, without the hyphen but with the article.) It’s set in a small village in central England and is narrated, as is the novel, by Dr. Harvey (James Hayter, who bears a striking resemblance to Winston Churchill), the town physician. The central characters are two BFF’s, Bill (Glyn Dearman as a teenager, Stephen Murray as an adult) and Robin (Sean Barrett as a teenager, John Van Eyssen as an adult), and the woman they’re both interested in, Lena (Jennifer Dearman as a teenager, American import Barbara Payton as an adult – and the studio’s casting department deserves credit for finding a girl actress who looked like she could grow up to be Barbara Payton). There’s a prologue in which the two boys are playing at being knights, Robin wins their pretend joust, and Lena crowns Robin with a crown of laurel and gives Bill a crown of thorns. When the two grow up to be of college age they both go to Cambridge and study science, though Robin is merely being groomed by his father, Sir Walter (Percy Marmont, who in the 1930’s had acted in two of Alfred Hitchcock’s better British films, Rich and Strange and The Secret Agent), to take over the family’s plastics business. Lena returns from a long stay in the U.S. (obviously screenwriters Terence Fisher, who also directed, and Paul Tabori intended that to cover for Barbara Payton’s lack of a British accent) depressed and suicidal – she confesses to Dr. Harvey that she no longer wants to live. But she finds a purpose in life when Bill and Robin, who are pursuing some sort of major experiment in an old barn outside the center of town, draft her as their assistant in their research. What they’ve invented is a so-called “duplicator,” a machine that can make an exact copy of any physical object by drawing energy from a power source and converting it into matter. (Essentially Bill and Robin have invented the 3-D printer decades ahead of time.)

They first test it out on the doctor’s pocket watch, and Dr. Harvey is astonished that the copy is so perfect it even contains the bent chain link of the original. Then they try making a copy of a check written by Robin’s father, though they’ve left the amount and payee spaces blank. (Charles joked they should have tested it on a five-pound note, which leaves open the question of how a machine like this, if it actually existed, could be used for counterfeiting and forgery.) Using a 1,000-pound investment from Robin’s dad, he and Bill develop the machine to the point where it can duplicate not only inanimate objects but also living things, though the duplicate of the first animal Bill tries it on, a guinea pig, dies almost immediately. Bill realizes that what’s gone wrong is that the duplicate animal’s heart didn’t know how to start pumping so the animal could breathe, so he has to invent what amounts to a heart defibrillator to keep the cloned animal alive long enough so its heart starts beating normally. In the meantime Bill has developed a romantic crush on Lena (ya remember Lena?) but is too shy to tell her directly, and he’s thunderstruck when Lena announces her intention to marry Robin instead. Having already worked out the kinks on duplicating living things, Bill determines to use his duplicator to create a clone of Lena so he can make love to the duplicate while Robin is married to the original. Bill successfully creates Lena’s clone, whom he names “Helen” because it’s reasonably close to “Lena,” and takes her on a beachfront holiday, only Helen is upset and takes her sailboat out far beyond safety until Bill has to rescue her. When they get back to their rooms, Helen confesses that, since she has all Lena’s memories and emotions as well as her physical shape, she too is in love with Robin and not Bill. Accordingly Bill takes her back to the lab in their village and does another experiment with her to try to erase all her memories so she’ll forget she’s in love with Robin, only a short-circuit in the lab equipment causes a catastrophic fire and Robin and Dr. Harvey arrive too late to save anybody. Bill and one of the two Barbara Paytons are killed in the blaze, while Robin ends up with the survivor – only which one is it, Lena or Helen? There’s talk of two scars on either side of the clone’s neck, put there by Bill as part of the memory-burning experiment, though the scar we actually see is on the back of her neck – though the implication is that Robin ended up with the cloned Helen while the real Lena died in the fire.

What’s most amazing about Four Sided Triangle is its remarkable understatement; Charles called it “the anti-Frankenstein,” and certainly I too had noticed and registered the difference between Colin Clive’s manic performances in the two James Whale Frankenstein movies from the 1930’s and Stephen Murray’s chillingly matter-of-fact acting as Bill. It helps that he’s motivated not by some mad-scientist desire to rule the world but by simple human jealousy: he wants his best friend’s girl and if he can’t have the original, he’ll use his super-machine to clone her. This is especially surprising since Terence Fisher remained a Hammer mainstay for years and basically focused on recasting the whole Universal monster stable into films both sexier and gorier than the originals. Four Sided Triangle is a quite challenging film whose moral (and it does have one!) strikes at the heart of the whole concept of identity, of who we are and how we learn about that. It also raises the question Alfred Hitchcock had when he planned to film Sir James M. Barrie’s play Mary Rose, a haunting post-World War I fantasy about a woman who periodically disappears and then returns the same age even while everyone she left behind has aged normally, about what would happen if the dead did start coming back to life en masse and what would we do with them. Four Sided Triangle is a film whose understatement makes it seem all too relevant today (as does the accuracy of its scientific predictions, even though we luckily have not yet invented a machine that can clone living things) and is especially surprising given the kind of filmmaking Hammer would become famous for later in the 1950’s.