Death Line (1972) on Netflix
At Russell Square station, student Patricia Wilson and her boyfriend Alex Campbell find an unconscious man. He disappears before police arrive, and Inspector Calhoun takes the case.
- Netflix2.7/5
- IMDb5.9/106,074 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
Late at night in the London Underground, at Russell Square station, student Patricia Wilson and her boyfriend Alex Campbell, an American exchange student, come across a man lying unconscious on the stairwell. A card in his wallet names him James Manfred, OBE. They tell a policeman, but the man has vanished by the time anyone returns. Inspector Calhoun is assigned the disappearance and questions Alex, suggesting that he and Patricia robbed the man. A colleague tells Calhoun about the Victorian workers who built the tunnels and the legend that descendants of an 1892 cave-in still live below.
Cast
- Hugh Armstrongas The "Man"
- June Turneras The "Woman"
- Heather Stoneyas P.C.W. Alice Marshall
- Hugh Dicksonas Dr. Bacon
- Jack Woolgaras Platform Inspector
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Death Line (1972)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jay Kanter, the film's financier and Marlon Brando's original agent, approached Brando to play the cannibal, but Brando dropped out after his son fell ill with pneumonia, he had rushed through filming Last Tango in Paris to care for him, so Gary Sherman cast Hugh Armstrong instead.
- Christopher Lee agreed to work for scale because he wanted to work with Donald Pleasence, but the two barely share the screen in Lee's only scene: at 6 ft 5 in he stood eight inches taller, so Gary Sherman kept them in separate shots until Lee sat down.
- American International Pictures released Death Line in the US in an edited cut made to avoid an X rating, cutting it down and re-dubbing it and marketing it as a zombie film; Gary Sherman spoke of his bitterness at how AIP treated it.
- Gary Sherman based the film's cannibal survivors on the real navvies, Scottish and Welsh miners brought to London to dig the Underground tunnels, who were mistreated and left undug after a cave-in because they were working class.
- The Underground sequences were shot at Aldwych station, chosen as it had only been open for weekday peak services since 1962, and the Russell Square platform sign had a section blacked out because it pointed to a District Line that doesn't stop there.
- Death Line is credited as one of the earliest examples of a cannibal film, released just months after Man from Deep River and nearly a decade before Cannibal Holocaust (1980).
