The Flesh and the Fiends

Plot

In 1828 Edinburgh, Scotland, Dr. Knox (Peter Cushing) is a highly skilled anatomist who draws large crowds of medical students to his lectures on the human body. Though he is constantly at odds with his stuffy, backwards colleagues, he is highly venerated by his students and believes his duty is to push the medical profession forward. Unfortunately, due to the laws of the time very few cadavers are legally available to the medical profession, necessitating the use of graverobbers or "Resurrection men" to procure additional specimens. Dr. Knoxs assistant Dr. Mitchell (Dermot Walsh) and a young student named Jackson (John Cairney) and are given the task of buying the bodies, which are worth a small fortune... especially when fresh.

Meanwhile, drunken miscreants William Burke (George Rose) and William Hare (Donald Pleasence) discover that a lodger at Burkes boarding house has died still owing £4 in rent. When they find that the body can make them a handsome profit, they begin a career of murdering locals and selling them to the medical school. When Jackson goes to a local tavern to give Burke and Hare their pay, he becomes involved with tempestuous local prostitute Mary Patterson (Billie Whitelaw), who is also well-known to the killers.

Over time, Jackson and Mitchell begin to suspect that the bodies supplied by Burke and Hare are victims of foul play. Despite their concerns, Dr. Knox dismisses any attempt at going to the police. When Jacksons new girlfriend Mary becomes their latest victim, Jackson discovers her body in the lecture room and he too is killed when he confronts the murderous duo. When they murder a well-known mentally ill youth (Melvyn Hayes), however, they quickly become murder suspects and are caught by an angry mob. Hare agrees to turn states evidence against his former partner and is set free, though vindictive locals catch him and burn out his eyes. Burke is executed by hanging, still complaining that Dr. Knox never paid him for the final body. Knox, for his part in the killings, is the object of widespread public outrage, but ultimately not punished or censured by his colleagues (to whom Dr. Mitchell eloquently defends him). Though he is free to continue lecturing, he ultimately feels guilt over his part in the horrors, admitting to his devoted niece Martha (June Laverick) that the murder victims "seemed so small in my scheme of things. But I knew how they died." The film ends with Knox, who assumes his lectures will now be empty, instead finding himself greeted with applause from a packed hall of students. Apparently a changed man, he begins his lecture with the Hippocratic Oath which includes the promise to "never do harm to anyone."

Cast

Production

Writer/director John Gilling had previously written a film about Burke and Hare entitled The Greed of William Hart in 1948. At that time, however, the British Board of Film Censors demanded that all references to the real-life killers were removed, and so Gilling was forced to rename the killers and several other key characters. The Flesh and the Fiends restores the correct historical names and begins with the text: "[this] is a story of vice and murder. We make no apologies to the dead. It is all true." Gilling, along with Producers Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman of Tempean Films, formed Triad Productions specifically to make the film. It was the first horror film to feature newly minted horror star Peter Cushing that was not produced by Hammer Studios.

In his autobiography, Cushing who had been catapulted to fame by his portrayal of Dr. Victor Frankenstein in 1957s The Curse of Frankenstein compared the role of Dr. Knox to his most famous character: "Now it seemed to me that Knox and Frankenstein had a lot in common. The minds of these exceptional men were driven by a single desire: to inquire into the unknown. Ahead of their time, like most great scientists, their work and motives were misunderstood."

The drooping left eye which Cushing uses in his performance (emphasized in many of the films posters, though not in the American one) is accurate to the real Dr. Knox, who had his left eye destroyed and his face disfigured by smallpox he contracted as an infant.

Reception

The film was a box office disappointment.