Incense for the Damned

An adaptation of Simon Raven's novel Doctors Wear Scarlet which bears a fictional director credit: Hartford-Davis took his name off the picture after unexplained difficulties, and it must be the first time in screen history that a film-maker has disowned the only remotely good thing he's done. The film bears some marks of its production difficulties, but in general it sticks closely to Raven's novel, in which the act of vampirism becomes for the hero (Mower) a therapeutic acting-out of the stifling, parasitic mental processes of Oxford that surround him. Probably the theme really needs a Polanski or a Franju to do it justice, but here it is at least put together neatly and coherently, with some elegant location camerawork from Desmond Dickinson.