The Flesh and the Fiends

In 1828 Edinburgh, Dr. Robert Knox 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. Knox's assistant Geoffrey Mitchell and a young student named Chris Jackson are given the task of buying the bodies, which are worth a small fortune... especially when fresh. Meanwhile, drunken miscreants William Burke and William Hare discover that a lodger at Burke's 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 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 his concerns, Dr. Knox dismisses any attempt at going to the police. When Jackson's 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 however, they quickly become murder suspects and are caught by an angry mob. Hare agrees to turn King's 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 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==

Writer/ Producer John 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 movie to feature Peter Cushing that was not produced by Hammer Films. Gilling had previously written the filmThe Greed of William Hart (1948) about Burke and Hare. 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." However, the filmmakers were still not permitted to use Burke and Hare's name in the title, and chief censor John Trevelyan called Baker to his office to discuss his concerns about several "potentially offensive sequences," though the film was ultimately passed uncut with an "X" rating. To minimize any similarities to Gilling's previous film (and to the then-unproduced script on the same subject by Dylan Thomas, which would eventually be produced in 1985 as The Doctor and the Devils), the film's producers brought in Leon Griffiths to rewrite Gilling's original screenplay. The drooping left eye which Cushing uses in his performance (emphasized in some film 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 has been described as a "box office disappointment," or a film which did "average business. In February 1960 Kinematograph Weekly wrote "I hardly expected the best people to rave about “ The Flesh And The Fiends "’ (Regal — Dyaliscope—British) and they didn’t. But no matter, the full-blooded melodrama concerning notorious body-snatchers Burke and Hare is, as was confidently anticipated by most astute bookers, scoring fluently at the Rialto, Coventry Street. It’s well to remember that horror films, unlike their TV counterparts, do not play to captive audiences. They ring the belli simply because a large section of the public likes spine-chilling fare." The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "The attempt to do justice to the drama of medical ethics, centred on Dr. Knox and the celebrated horrors of Burke and Hare and with a torrid, time-consuming sub-plot about a prostitute thrown in, leads to continual changes of mood and interest that weaken the film's total effect. The more rhetorical medical school sections are inevitably overshadowed by the brisk gruesomeness of the many murder scenes, though there is little effort to build tension in these, and the studio sets fail to capture the grim atmosphere pervading many of Edinburgh's closes even today. Corpses toppling into brine baths, a rat hunt and a blinding provide most of the ghoulishness. Peter Cushing offers his usual polished performance, but the Oirish dialogue given to George Rose and Donald Pleasence makes them more comic than sinister." Variety praised Cushing's performance as a "most effective study in single-minded integrity which knits the film together admirably." The Radio Times Guide to Films gave the film 3/5 stars, writing: "This explicitly scary and darkly atmospheric retelling of the Burke and Hare story stars Peter Cushing, exceptional as the coldly ambitious Dr Knox ... The grimy poverty of 19th-century Edinburgh provides a vivid background to this unflinching shocker, which uses stark black-and-white imagery to startling effect." In British Sound Films: The Studio Years 1928–1959 David Quinlan rated the film as "average", writing: "Busy, grisly shocker whose best asset is its period feel." Film and Filming's Ian Moss criticized the film, writing "I can't understand anyone wishing to see this film voluntarily," and arguing that the script afforded the characters no depth. ==Versions==

Several cuts of the film have circulated in different markets. The currently available DVD from Image Entertainment lists the runtime for the "uncut" original theatrical version at 94 minutes, with a slightly extended "Continental" version – produced for European markets with more permissive censors – running at 95 minutes and including short sequences or alternate takes with more nudity. ==See also==