One of my favorite headlines from The Onion is “Elvis Dead.  Is Elvis Alive?”

I’m betting Stanley Baker in 1963’s The Man Who Finally Died is feeling that way.  This German ex-pat has been a Brit since childhood, where he was informed twenty years prior that his father had died.  Now he has received a mysterious message that his father has died only recently. 

The town is not very welcoming to the prodigal son who has come to visit, starting with the detective who tails him when he enters the hotel.  Something I thought was bizarre is Baker asks the clerk if there are any messages for his father, knowing the man is dead.  I’m not sure why he thought there would be any messages for his father left at the hotel, when he lived in a mansion in the area.  Also, if he thinks dad perished twenty years before, why would a message be held for the man for that long?

This may seem like nit-picking, but this almost everything about this film is confusing.  Consider Baker’s lack of reaction when he discovers the mysterious gloves he found at the cemetery belong to a girl (Georgina Ward) with whom he shares a father.  He doesn’t have any follow-up questions for the half-sister he had no knowledge of before, nor does the script explore this.

That curious lack of interest in the characters extends to the great many suspicious ones which hover around the proceedings.  There’s Mai Zetterling as his father’s last wife.  For some reason, Baker’s old nanny (Barbara Everest) is still with the household.  Then there’s Peter Cushing, an obvious former Nazi whose presence I still couldn’t full comprehend even after the film was over.

Perhaps the most impactful character is Niall MacGinnis as a somebody who keeps resurfacing in the course of Baker’s investigation, and whose motives always feel suspect.  He is actually the person who gets Baker involved in the first place, having a friend place an anonymous phone call to the man.  Something seems odd even in this early scene, as he announces the mountain air is like wine, but he’s drinking a beer, so I wondered if that means he actually doesn’t like the air in this locale. 

Really, there’s so much duplicity in this movie that it can be hard to tell what anybody is really feeling at any point in time.  Much of it feels like it goes from point A to points B and higher without any real reason for doing so.  And one of those locations left me with a great many questions, that being the camp where Ward is living in a shack.  What is this camp?  Do the people live there voluntarily, or were they forced?  I shouldn’t have to be asking questions like this.

One problem might be this is a film adaptation of a TV miniseries, and I suspect the distillation of such a large work resulted in the loss of much of the necessary connective tissue.  Just from the script alone, anybody should have concluded this should not have been a feature film.

The movie has one very memorable aspect, though it is an unfortunate one.  The score employs “stings”, very brief bits of music are the flourishes to add a punch to a word or moment, to an extent that turns many deadly serious lines into parody.  Alas, hearing a flurry of harpsichord notes at the end of a line like “You see, my father was a Protestant” push it into Airplane! territory.

The Man Who Finally Died is a curiously absent experience, full of developments that don’t happen organically, courtesy of characters that never feel even close to being fleshed out.  One of the least essential of those is that played by Cushing.  While I am always happy to see one of my favorite actors in a work, I could never get my bearings on who he was supposed to be or his importance in this story.  As I was watching this as part of a box set titled Cushing Curiosities, I was mostly curious why this character felt grafted onto the plot.

Dir: Quentin Lawrence

Starring Stanley Baker, Peter Cushing, Georgina Ward

Watched as part of Severin’s Cushing Curiosities blu-ray box set