The Flesh and the Fiends is a British historical thriller starring Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasance. It recently appeared on DVD, and needless to say I immediately added it to my Netflix list. I’m pleased to report that I wasn’t disappointed.
The film is based on a famous series of real-life murders that occurred in 18th century Edinburgh. Medicine was for the first time being taught as a systematic science, and the need for cadavers for anatomy studies far outstripped the supplies. People were a lot touchier about what happened to their mortal clay back then, and since the automobile wasn’t invented yet, you weren’t able to check the organ donation organ on the back of your driver’s license.Into the breach stepped the so-called ‘resurrection men,’ more commonly known as grave robbers. However, a pair of Scottish lowlifes named Burke and Hare went a bit further. Burke ran a lodging house, and after selling a recently deceased renter to the local medical school run by the eminent Dr. Robert Knox, he and Hare went on to more actively furnish additional bodies. Knox must have realized the dodgy provenance of these cadavers, but presumably he considered the deaths of a small number of ignorant slum inhabitants a small price to pay in the Advance of Science.
The film opens with a card announcing that it won’t apologize to the dead, since everything it portrays is the truth. That’s a bit of a stretch, of course, but they obviously went to some lengths to get much of the story right. Unlike other films inspired by Burke and Hare, including the Val Lewton adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher, and the 1985 The Doctor and the Devils (I guess Burke and Hare movies lend themselves to alliterative titles), here they actually use the real life names of the key participants, including several of the victims.
Still, Hare and Burke knocked off more than fifteen people before the end, and obviously things are a bit telescoped here in this 90 minute film. Also, while they did murder a slum prostitute named Mary Patterson, one doubts the real life Ms. Patterson was nearly as hot, not to mention as well-preserved, as actress Billie Whitelaw.* As far as I can tell, Patterson’s romantic entanglement with one of Knox’s students is, on the other hand, fictitious. Presumably this plot element was extrapolated from the fact that several of Knox’s students reportedly recognized her body when it turned up in the dissection room, which naturally suggests that they had at some point sampled her wares.
[*Ms. Whitelaw continues to act today, and recently appeared as one of the townsfolk in this year’s Hot Fuzz. She was joined by Timothy Dalton, who had earlier played the Dr. Knox analogue in The Doctor and the Devils. Ms. Whitelaw is probably best remembered as the evil nanny in the original The Omen.]This is a pretty well-made movie, aided, obviously, by the cast. Cushing is properly cold-blooded in the role of Knox, and is a creepily more realistic version of his recurring character of Dr. Frankenstein in the Hammer film series. Both are men who shrug off the occasional lost life, as long as it was lost in the interests of advancing science.
Sadly, one can even nearly agree with Knox. In a world of medical quacks, it’s possible to argue that his scientifically and systematically-trained students would have gone on to save hundreds or even thousands of people who would have otherwise, thus justifying the cost of a few lives in their training. And again, given the class snobbery of the time, the fact that the victims were slum residents must have eased his conscience even further. (Indeed, in the end the film itself can be read as forgiving, if not condoning, Knox’s trespasses.)
As good as Cushing is—and needless to say, that’s very good indeed—the picture is owned by George Rose as Burke and, especially, Pleasance as Hare. A cunning pair, they are entirely too believable as two outwardly affable monsters who fall into mass murder with nary a second thought. Indeed, the film posits that they considered it a bit of an adventure. When they kill their first victim, Hare is seen dancing around in a state of near sexual arousal.
In any case, this is really a very good film, and well worth a look. Aficionados of real life medical malcontents may wish to team this up with Boris Karloff’s somewhat similar Corridors of Blood (which while based less stringently on unconnected real-life events, also itself borrows from the tale of Burke and Hare), although this is rather the better movie.
For what it’s worth, the DVD of Flesh and the Fiends features both the British cut of the film, and the “continental” cut, which per the traditions of the time contained flashes of nudity and other racy content aiming to slake the more lurid tastes of viewers in continental Europe and the Far East. The film is presented in gorgeous black and white and in its original widescreen formatting.
