The Man in Half Moon Street [Impossible Voyages #23] – Blue Towel Productions

As mentioned previously, in “Impossible Voyages” I’m watching and writing about a run of new (to me) science fiction films to be watched over last year, which has extended to this year (2026). You can read the rationale and ground rules here. In the meantime, we are advancing from 1944 to 1945 with this movie, #23 in this series.

So, we gots ourselves another mad scientist movie here, which has been sort of the go-to schtick for science fiction movies in the 1940s so far (see here and here and here and here). But there’s no monster in sight here, unless one counts the main character and his unethical medical practices.

Spoilers Ahead

The Man in Half Moon Street (1945)

Directed by Ralph Murphy

The Story:  Doctor Julian Karell is secretly a man who has kept young for decades by performing experiments involving gland transplants from other people, experiments which have frequently been lethal for the donors. He works closely with the elderly Dr. Kurt van Bruecken, who is becoming increasingly disillusioned that the project is genuinely for the betterment of humanity, and not just something Karell is selfishly doing for himself. Karell’s life is complicated by the fact that he’s fallen in love with beautiful socialite Eve Brandon, and that people in Eve’s circle are becoming suspicious of him. At the same time, he is struggling physically as the time for another transplant approaches, but van Bruecken’s age and reluctance are making it difficult to know how to proceed. In the end, his latest donor dies of a heart attack brought on the preparatory treatments, and Karell attempts to flee England to get help from a doctor in France. Pursued by the police, but supported by Eve, he nevertheless succumbs to his aged condition before he is able to get away, and dies.

Starring: Nils Asther as Julian Karell, Helen Walker as Eve, Reinhold Schünzel as Dr. van Bruecken, Edmund Breon as Eve’s father, Paul Cavanaugh as Dr. Latimer (a friend of the Brandon’s who becomes suspicious of Karell), Morton Lowry as Alan Guthrie, and Matthew Boulton as DI Ned Garth (the police inspector who investigates Guthrie’s death and Karell’s involvement with it).

Comments: The Man in Half Moon Street is a tricky film to pin down as far as a genre. Wikipedia describes it as a “melodrama horror romance science-fiction film,” which is as about an accurate assessment as one could hope for. And it’s possible that in that listing, “horror” is ranked a bit too highly. The movie is about something horrific, to be sure–a scientist who basically kills someone every ten years in order to maintain his youth. But it rarely feels horrific: those deaths are only just mentioned here or there to the audience. And Dr. Karell’s current victim (whom he is not actually trying to kill, mind you) is a guy whom he literally saved from suicide first, and whose death comes from a neglectful accident, and is reported via dialogue after taking place off-screen.

Probably the most horrific thing about all of this is the repeated disregard of any concerns by Dr. Karell, and the casually selfish quality that Nils Asther imbues him with. Like many of the “mad scientists” of these movies, he is indeed a monster, but he’s so self-deceived about it that sometimes it’s hard to tell. Karell seems to genuinely care for Eve, and he doesn’t overtly wish any harm on anyone. He doesn’t even lash out or become enraged with van Bruecken when the elderly scientist destroys the chemical that is giving him his reprieve from death.

Indeed, we never get a moment in the film which definitively paints him a villain–instead it is left come through his quiet obsession with his experiment, the repeated lies he tells everyone to keep them off his back, and the quietly cold and manipulative manner that he has with Guthrie, or even the older woman who was apparently a love-interest of his decades earlier.

When you describe it like this, it all sounds pretty chilling, but the problem is that watching it threatens strongly to be dull, and to drag on. The utter wrongness of this guy gets muddled by the fact that so much of the movie treats him like the victim of a romantic tragedy. This is of course where the “melodrama” and “romance” descriptors come in, because a lot of the film concerns his relationship with the beautiful Eve Brandon, and it’s Eve who sees Julian in this romanticised way.

Of course, she never learns of the many victims of his research, but she does acknowledge that she understands that a great dreamer such as he is certainly going to be someone society considers dangerous and will reject, and she doesn’t care. She just wants to follow the fantasy she sees in him. When it all goes wrong and he dies as his advanced age suddenly catches up with him, she doesn’t react as someone who has lost the love of her life, she instead just looks like someone playing the part of a tragic heroine in a “melodrama romance.”

The fact that Eve seems just as delusional as Julian is actually quite interesting in theory, but the movie never digs into it, and as a result the movie doesn’t make much of an impression. The performances by the three leads (Nils Asther, Helen Walker and Reinhold Schünzel) are all good and there’s a lot going on there, but the movie lacks the dramatic punch it needs to make its cerebral, talky approach to the material as effective as it should be.

I will say there is one particular moment that I thought was a pretty outstanding moment of cinema. Toward the end when Julian and Eve are on the train, there is a moment where Julian seems to age gradually but dramatically in front of us that I’m pretty sure was achieved just through lighting changes.

It was an effective moment in a movie that overall is thoughtful, but not particularly engaging.

The Man in Half Moon Street is based on a play by Barré Lyndon that was adapted again into film as The Man Who Could Cheat Death from 1959, which co-starred Christopher Lee (as a character who doesn’t even appear in The Man in Half Moon Street). I haven’t seen the second version of the story, but it is all together more lurid sounding, with more on-screen murders, and an insane woman setting the titular scientist on fire with an oil lamp.