Sapphire & Steel - Assignment Four [TV] (1981)
Directed by David Foster

Film Review

If you didn't suffer from fotografizophobia (that well-known fear of having your photo taken) beforehand there's a good chance you will do after watching this fourth gripping story in the Sapphire & Steel series.  It's a return to the bleakly claustrophobic nightmare terrain of Assignment Two, with menace lurking in every corner of the dreary confines of a rundown boarding house.  This time, the threat facing our heroes is far weirder, far more disturbing than the disgruntled ghosts of their second adventure and the vindictive mechanically-enhanced animal parts of their third.  Now they are up against a mysterious 'something' that has allowed itself to become trapped in every photograph that has been, and will ever be, taken.  As if that was not bad enough, this 'something' has found a way out of the photographs and has acquired a nasty habit of taking people our of our world and imprisoning them in old photographs.  Nasty.

These are totally terrifying concepts which the writer P.J. Hammond exploits to truly nightmarish effect.  Episode Three concludes with the most horrific cliff hanger in the entire series - a superb example of horror by implication.  All that we see before the image dissolves into the closing credits is an enlarged photographic still.  It is what we hear that freezes our blood - the death screams of the girl trapped in the photograph as the villain of the piece sets fire to the original.  Forget The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby - this is horror of a much higher order, the stuff of which our worst nightmares is made.  How ITV was able to broadcast it on a weekday evening well before the 9pm watershed, when school kids across the land were sitting in front of the telly doing their homework, is a mystery.  There is in all likelihood a generation of television viewers that was scarred for life by this jolt of undiluted terror.

The fear factor is heightened by the fact that, for the first time since we met them, Sapphire and Steel genuinely do look as if they are going to be defeated.  They come within a whisker of being so, and all credit to David McCallum and Joanna Lumley for revealing a far more vulnerable, almost human side to their characters.  As in Assignment Two, it is a mere human that averts calamity, this time a downmarket prostitute named Liz.  Sympathetically played by Alyson Spiro, Liz is a welcome addition to the team, one who, for once, does not end up being callously sacrificed by Steel.  When the unnamed threat takes on its human form, it has the sinister presence of a faceless man - a concept 'borrowed' either from Norton Juster's classic children's novel The Phantom Tollbooth or Richard Fleischer's film noir Follow Me Quietly (1949).  The one mistake that P.J. Hammond made was to give this fiend a human face (actually, two human faces) - in doing so he robs it of much of its mystique and malevolence.   On this occasion, their adversary proves to be so powerful that Sapphire and Steel score only a partial victory, with the menace not defeated but set to return seventy years hence (which is a bit worrying when you consider what happens to the duo in their sixth assignment).  It's time to get out the photo album and destroy the whole damn lot - just to be on the safe side...

Film Synopsis

Sapphire and Steel arrive at a seemingly deserted old building, the ground floor of which functions as a shop that buys and sells lost property.  With so many objects from different time periods in such close proximity the risk of a temporal breach is dangerously high but what most concerns the duo are the montage photographs created by the former landlord, who has mysteriously disappeared.  These provide a possible access point for a malevolent force from another dimension.  The duo's investigation is disturbed by the appearance of young children who look as if they belong in another era.  They are in fact photographs of children who have been brought to life by the building's present landlord.  When Sapphire and Steel question the building's only tenant, a young call girl named Liz, she finds it hard to describe the landlord.  It is as if he had no face...