THE MAN WHO HAUNTED HIMSELF

Publicity poster for The Man Who Haunted Himself (© Brian Dearden/EMI Films/Associated British Picture Corporation/Warner-Pathé – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

When we think of the late British actor Sir Roger Moore (1927-2017) and the varied roles that he played on the big and small screens through his long career, it is almost certainly James Bond that first comes to mind, no doubt followed by Simon Templar in the very popular TV series The Saint and also Lord Brett Sinclair in another popular TV series, The Persuaders. Yet whenever Sir Roger was asked which was his own personal favourite appearance, or which production did he consider to contain his best performance, he invariably named a British movie from 1970 that today is scarcely even remembered in comparison to his above-mentioned roles, apparently due in no small way to the very poor publicity that it received at the time of its original release.

The movie that I am referring to, and which I was lucky enough to catch on the British Freeview TV channel 'Talking Pictures' a couple of nights ago (due to a much-appreciated alert from friend Mike Playfair – thanks Mike!), is the intriguingly-entitled The Man Who Haunted Himself. Although it is generally categorized as a psychological thriller, its quite extraordinary denouement (more about which later) abruptly propels it into an entirely different genre, suspended somewhere between science-fiction and the supernatural.

Directed by Basil Dearden, The Man Who Haunted Himself is based upon what was originally a short story, written by Anthony Armstrong in 1940 who later expanded it into a novel, published in 1957 and entitled The Strange Case of Mr Pelham. This title is immediately reminiscent of another, much earlier short story subsequently converted into a novel, namely The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson and published in 1886. Certainly, this movie and the novel that inspired it  play out very much like a variation upon the Jekyll/Hyde theme, but with one crucial, fundamental, and fascinating difference, as will soon be discovered.

The movie begins with a scene in which company co-director Harold Pelham (played by Sir Roger) is driving home when he inexplicably experiences an urge to drive fast and recklessly – dramatically at odds with his normal exceedingly staid, ultra-traditional, creature of habit persona – and as he does so, the viewer sees his cherry-red Rover P5 transform briefly into a sleek silver-grey sports car (a 1969 Lamborghini Islero GTS, for petrolheads wanting to know!), but whether this transformation is literal or metaphorical is not made clear. However, it is not the last time that we see that very distinctive sports car. Inevitably, Pelham's rash behaviour swiftly catches up with him in the most dreadful manner – he loses control and crashes his Rover at high speed. We next see him unconscious in a hospital operating theatre, and as the surgeon and his team are working upon him, his heartbeat suddenly ceases. Following CPR, however, it begins again – but bizarrely the heart-monitoring device records not one but two heartbeats, which continue separately but in synchrony for a few moments before one abruptly vanishes, leaving just a single heartbeat as normal.

We next see Pelham at home, seemingly fully recovered, ready to drive off to his company – Freeman, Pelham & Dawson – in a replacement red Rover P5. Upon his arrival, he enters a board meeting where the other directors are discussing whether to accept the offer of a merger from a larger rival company. All of them are in favour, but Pelham argues vigorously against it, claiming that it is less a merger and more of a takeover. Yet the other directors are far from convinced and vigorously disagree. Not surprisingly, this worrying turn of events occupies Pelham's mind – until, that is, a far more worrying turn of events swiftly takes centre stage in his life. To Pelham's increasing bemusement and, eventually, alarm and fear, all manner of different people, not just colleagues at work but also various much more casual acquaintances, including his barber, a jeweler, and in particular an attractive young female stranger, claim to have lately encountered him in locations where he cannot remember having been, at times when he knows full well he was somewhere else entirely, and indulging in all manner of amoral pursuits that are totally out of character for him.

This bizarre train of claims culminates with the attractive young woman making it clear that the two of them are having an affair, despite Pelham having no memory whatsoever of ever having spent any time with her. She even says as much when they unexpectedly encounter one another at a casino one night while Pelham and his wife Eve are paying a visit there. Not surprisingly, this enrages Pelham's wife, who refuses to believe him when he totally denies the accusation, and duly moves out of their home with their two young children to spend some time at her mother's and give both of them some space. As the days go by, the extraordinary situation of seemingly being in two totally different places at the same time intensifies, making Pelham ever more fraught and confused, but by now firmly convinced that there must be someone out there who is masquerading as him, a veritable double, in fact, yet why?

Cleverly, the viewer is kept in the dark just as much as Pelham is, because for quite some time his doppelganger – yes, there is indeed one – is not shown, only the outcomes of his unseen actions are revealed, and the effects that they have upon a thoroughly bamboozled Pelham. Tantalizingly, however, there are a number of brief scenes of someone smoking but with face unseen while sitting inside a sports car outside Pelham's house, a sports car identical to the one that his Rover morphed into during his reckless, ill-fated driving at the movie's onset.

Eventually, it all becomes too much for Pelham, and he voluntarily agrees to spend some days in therapy with a psychiatrist after having spoken with him earlier and hearing him say that the belief in a doppelganger existing is a well known psychiatric condition. Pelham stays at the latter's clinic throughout the course of treatment, in the hope of determining once and for all exactly what is happening inside his own mind. At the end of this course, the psychiatrist's conclusion is that, just as he had suspected at the beginning, there is no actual doppelganger – instead, Pelham's experiences are delusions caused by a subconscious desire to break out of his strict, conservative behavioural constraints and enjoy new, very different experiences. He even advises Pelham to treat himself to a new set of clothes wholly unlike his habitual preferences, in order to kickstart this radical change in his lifestyle's direction, which Pelham reluctantly does.

Wearing his somewhat garish new attire, Pelham then goes directly to his office at his company, only to discover that what had been happening to him was definitely no series of delusions. On the contrary, during his absence his doppelganger has completely reversed Pelham's refusal to agree to the merger with the rival company, and the merger has gone ahead – but worse is still to come. Knowing that his wife and children will be back home from their stay at her mother's by now, he phones her up to tell her what has happened – only for the phone at their home to be answered by…himself, i.e. his doppelganger, the 'other' Harold Pelham, who states categorically that HE is Harold Pelham!

After frantically racing home in his Rover, the real Pelham goes inside, and there indeed is his doppelganger (also played by Sir Roger), identical to him in every way in terms of features, build, voice, and expressions, but dressed in Pelham's usual, sedate business suit, and claiming just as vehemently as the real Pelham that he, the doppelganger, is the real Pelham and that it is the real Pelham who is the imposter, the doppelganger. And, horror of horrors, Pelham's wife, his children, and even Alex, a friend from his company who happens to be visiting, all believe the doppelganger to be the real Pelham, especially in view of the wholly uncharacteristic clothes that the person who actually IS the real Pelham is wearing. Poised, confident, and fully in control of the situation, the doppelganger coolly asks the others to leave, so that he can be left alone for a few moments with the hysterical and totally defeated real Pelham, and once they are alone, with a mocking triumphant sneer on his face the doppelganger finally explains to the dejected real Pelham exactly how all of this has come about. So, what is this key revelation, the movie's long-awaited and much-anticipated denouement?

SPOILER ALERT!! Normally, I do not give spoilers in my reviews, but to review this particular movie adequately, I see no alternative but to dissect and thoroughly discuss its denouement, because it is absolutely integral to the entire film's raison d'être. Consequently, if you don't want to know what that denouement is, READ NO FURTHER!!

The official UK DVD of The Man Who Haunted Himself (© Brian Dearden/EMI Films/Associated British Picture Corporation/Warner-Pathé – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Sadly, what the denouement turns out to be was for me a major let-down, because in my view it is thoroughly preposterous, a deus ex machina resolution of the most implausible, thoroughly ridiculous kind. I know that I often advise viewers to suspend disbelief when watching movies, especially imaginative ones, but there are times, albeit only very occasionally, when I cannot follow my own advice. This was one of those times – and here is why:

The doppelganger reveals that when the real Pelham was on the operating table after the car crash and was clinically dead for a few moments before CPR revived him, he, the doppelganger, was "let out" (to quote the doppelganger's own words), his coming into existence presumably explaining the brief burst of double heartbeats recorded by the heart-monitoring device. But how on earth could this be? How can a physical, tangible human duplicate spontaneously come into existence, be "let out"? And just where, pray tell, was this duplicate, this doppelganger, "let out", because he certainly did not make an appearance inside the operating theatre?

Like I said earlier, this movie is basically an unusual, offbeat take on the Jekyll/Hyde scenario, in that it deals with someone whose personality's good and evil aspects have become separate entities. Yet whereas in the original Jekyll/Hyde novel by Stevenson they still share the same body (even though that body's morphology changes to reflect outwardly whichever entity is in control internally at any one time), in this movie these entities are represented in an exactly converse manner – by possessing physically separate, but morphologically identical, bodies. Yet this is still not the climax to what had by now transformed at least for me from being an engrossing and elegant psychological thriller into an increasingly farcical, credibility-lacking fantasy film.

After the doppelganger states coldly and menacingly with an evil glint in his eye that this situation "cannot go on, one of us will have to go", the real Pelham vows to go to the police, and drives away in his red Rover, closely pursued by the doppelganger in the enigmatic silver-grey sports car – confirming that he was indeed the unseen smoker sitting in it outside Pelham's house. Finally, via some mystifying means not revealed on-screen, instead of one car still chasing the other, the two cars are now suddenly shown driving directly towards one another, as if planning to smash into each other head-on. At the last moment, however, the Rover driven by the real Pelham swerves wildly to one side and veers off the road as it crosses a bridge, crashing through the bridge's balustrade and plunging down towards the river below it.

Yet just before the Rover actually hits the surface of the river, the viewer plainly sees the real Pelham abruptly vanish while still inside the car, blinking out of existence. The camera then pans to the doppelganger, standing by the broken balustrade and clutching his heart, his former evil grin replaced by a grimace of agony, and at the same time we hear a double heartbeat for a short time. Then the two heartbeats merge into one, and he stands up straight, the pain gone, and his face bearing what looks to be a mixed expression of perplexity and calm, before he turns away and the credits roll.

What are we to make of this very ambiguous ending? To my mind, the blinking out of existence of the real Pelham followed by the doppelganger experiencing a double heartbeat for a short time before they merge into a single one, and then his no-longer evil but now calm if perplexed expression collectively suggest that the two Pelhams, the good but persecuted 'real' Pelham and the ruthless evil Pelham doppelganger, have become one again, and that the Pelham who turns away at the very end of the film is the original whole Pelham, back as he was before his car crash and the inadvertent (not to mention inexplicable!) 'letting out' of the evil component of his personality as a physically-discrete doppelganger.

The Man Who Haunted Himself is a very curious movie, but also an extremely compelling one, in which Sir Roger was able to show off very successfully just how versatile an actor he could be if given the opportunity – so very far removed from the eyebrow-raising, wisecracking caricature that so many people think of nowadays when they hear his name.

As a taster for what to expect if you have the opportunity to watch this movie – and I definitely recommend that you do, bizarre denouement notwithstanding – click here to view its official trailer. And click here if you can't wait to watch the entire movie and want to see the weird but undeniably chilling Pelham meeting Pelham scene right now!

And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!