The Man Who Finally Died (1963)

A hearse passes a German hotel and next thing “Newman” (Stanley Baker) arrives rather bemused. Why? Well that’s because it was apparently the funeral of his dad, but he thought he had died twenty years ago. Events only become more curious when he then discovers that dad “Deutsch” had a young wife “Lisa” (Mai Zetterling) who lives in a sprawling mansion with “Martha” (Barbara Everest) who remembers him as a child. Something is definitely amiss, and when it transpires that they are both living as guests of local and rather creepy doctor “von Brecht” (Peter Cushing) who runs a local camp for displaced persons after the war, well he becomes even more suspicious. Meantime, local policeman “Hofmeister” (Eric Portman) is sniffing around with his henchman (Nigel Green) as is the enigmatic insurance investigator “Brenner” (Niall MacGinnis). Quite quickly, things start to become as dangerous as they are confusing for “Newman” as he becomes more and more convinced that his father might still be alive. What now ensues offers us the potential for an intrigue, but it’s got too many red herring storylines that just peter our before a denouement that’s a really quite disappointing hybrid of half a dozen better crime noirs. There’s a lot of dialogue but little actual characterisation; the wooden Baker doesn’t really impress; Zetterling features far too sparingly to make much impact and there are just too many daft German accents to make ziss much güt! The production itself isn’t anyone’s finest work either with some fairly obvious continuity errors and quite a few clunky edits not really helping the overlong preamble set this up to be very compelling.