The Man Who Finally Died ** (1963, Stanley Baker, Peter Cushing, Mai Zetterling, Nigel Green, Alfred Burke, Eric Portman, Georgina Ward) – Classic Movie Review 10,834

The very Welsh Stanley Baker stars as Joe Newman, who goes back to his German roots to search in Bavaria for information about what became of his father in the Second World War and is drawn into a tangled web of intrigue in director Quentin Lawrence’s 1963 film The Man Who Finally Died, based on a 1959 ITV series.

Joe Newman, formerly Joachim Deutsch, a German immigrant living in Britain since the outbreak of World War Two, returns to his small home town in Bavaria after receiving a mysterious phone call telling him his father Kurtz, believed to have died during the Second World War, is not really dead.

Peter Cushing as Doctor Peter von Brecht and Mai Zetterling as Lisa von Deutsch are involved in a plot to swap his father with a top scientist to spirit him off behind the Iron Curtain.

Written by Lewis Greifer and Louis Marks, from an original by Lewis Greifer, this fair British CinemaScope black and white thriller is energetically done and reasonably well acted, but the rather outlandish yarn is unfortunately not as interesting or inventive as it sounds.

The Man Who Finally Died is acceptably involving if understandably very dated.

Nigel Green and Peter Cushing in The Man Who Finally Died (1963).

Also in the cast are Eric Portman as Inspector Hofmeister, Nigel Green as Sergeant Hirsch, Georgina Ward as Maria, Niall MacGinnis as Brenner, Barbara Everest as Martha, Harold Scott as Professor, Alfred Burke as Heinrich, James Ottaway as Rahn, Mela White as Helga, Maya Sorell as Minna and Mela White.

It is made by Twickenham Film Studios, St Margarets, Twickenham, Middlesex, England.

Stanley Baker and Nigel Green starred in Zulu the following year.

The 1959 seven-part television drama serial aired on ITV, and was produced by ATV. Each episode was 30 minutes, and the cast included Richard Pasco and Delphi Lawrence. Unusually, the series still exists in its entirety.

The films of Quentin Lawrence: The Trollenberg Terror (1958), Cash on Demand (1961), The Man Who Finally Died (1963), We Shall See (1964), and The Secret of Blood Island (1964).

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 10,834

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