I viewed this as I was looking at titles with James Payton in them. This is a little gem that has a good story-line which leaves you wanting more. The basic premise is good and not too complicated. The main actors are strong and likable. You feel for the scientist as he tries to replicate the woman of his dreams.Do not expect scares more a complex situation. There are no great special effects it is more the dialogue than the actions which make this a great film.This is one of Hammer's better films.Barbara Payton is great in one of her final roles. There does seem to be chemistry between the actors and they grab your sympathy.

Years after it first came out in the United Kingdom I remember seeing Four Sided Triangle on a double bill in America. It was one of those films I never forgot. I didn't know at the time it came from the celebrated British company Hammer Pictures which gave us usually a more gory type of science fiction.When cloning was finally achieved I remember that this was the first film I remember discussing the possibility which was fact in this film. For all the science fiction involved at heart Four Sided Triangle is a romantic and tragic film which begins in childhood of the protagonists.Children who grow up to be Barbara Payton, John Van Eyssen, and Stephen Murray are seen and its plain early on that Murray will be the odd man out in this group. Payton is the object of their affections, Van Eyssen is the son of the local squire and Murray the abused son of the town drunk. Fortunately for him the town doctor James Hayter takes an interest in Murray and Hayter narrates the film in flashback and it is through his eyes we see what unfolds.Both Van Eyssen and Murray go to college and study science and they perfect a 'duplicating' machine that can just duplicate inanimate things out of air. Good possibilities there. But Murray who pines for Payton wants to go further. She's married Van Eyssen, no fool she as he's got money and position. But Murray with the help of a reluctant Hayter experiments on living matter and then goes for the ultimate experiment. Amazingly enough Payton agrees to be duplicated.I can't go any further, but I'm sure your mind boggles with all kinds of alternative endings. The two Paytons are named Lena and Helen and I will say there is something that Murray forgot in all his experimentation. Four Sided Triangle while done on the cheap is a sensitively made film with good performances from the cast and will make you think about the issues of cloning.

OK, I admit that there are some aspects of this film that are actually pretty good. The male actors are likable and charming (if maybe somewhat mannered and "stagey" in their performances). Barbara Payton is reasonably hot and is a much better actress than, say, Mamie Van Doren. Some of the photography and lighting and sets are really good. And the central plot idea has some resonance...who can't identify with the wish to recapture the love that got away? Unfortunately, the screenplay's structure is a mess (beware of any film that opens up with this kind of portentous narration). And it also requires that the characters act like morons. You can get away with characters this dense and unreflective if you are doing a satire. Robert Sheckley or R.A. Lafferty would have done wonderful things with this material. But "4ST" plays things completely straight...and takes 20 minutes too long to get to the good parts.I think this is one of those cases where the material just got away from the director and wouldn't pull together no matter what they did in editing and post-production. Or maybe the director (who went on to do many of Hammer's best regarded films) just needed a lurid horror element in his films to distract the audience from his weaknesses with more straight forward dramatic material. It may be that once he had Dracula to play with, he was working with material more suited to his strengths as a director.I gave this one an extra star because I am sure that audiences back then (with 50 years less movie watching backlog) probably enjoyed this more than I did, and it is too well made to be ranked with 3 star-and-below AIP and Roger Corman dumps from the same era. After all, even mediocre British movies of that period have a certain dignity and craftsmanship that exploitation and genre directors could never hope to get.

Seeing this movie for the second time, I was struck by how clearly it anticipates Hammer's later Frankenstein films. The relationship of the two scientists, with one more eager than the other to pursue bolder experiments, the look of the laboratory, even specific camera angles of Bill at work, all foreshadow Curse of Frankensetin some four years later.One can see Terence Fisher's style taking shape, though the complete Hammer atmosphere has yet to be established. A major aspect is the seriousness with which the storyline and characters are enacted. Fisher remarked once that when they were filming Curse of Frankenstein, it was tempting at first to do it almost tongue in cheek, but he realized that the more serious the approach, the better it would work in the long run. This film uses that same serious attitude to make the fantastic story seem plausible. The actors make their characters completely believable, no matter how outlandish the plot gets.This is a minor but fascinating exercise in the development of the Hammer legacy, and well worth seeing for anyone interested in Fifties British science fiction.