Dr. Frank Overton (Mark Stevens) and Dr. Helen Wieland (Marianne Koch) are co-workers from the World Health Organization. They work in the Low Temperature Unit in Berlin, Germany. Their immediate boss is Professor Hubbard (John Longden). Overton and Wieland have been successful in freezing and thawing Chimpanzees. Their hope is to be able to freeze humans who have terminal illnesses so they can be thawed and treated when cures for their diseases are eventually found. So far the chimps have been frozen for up to three months time.
Frank’s wife Joan (Delphi Lawrence) is a fashion reporter. Before marrying Frank she used to date Tony Stein (Joachim Hansen). She still does. Joan still loves her husband and is also jealous of Frank’s beautiful co-worker Helen. Helen is attracted to Frank but hides it. Frank is oblivious to everything.
Frank wins a prestigious award because of their work that will give both Helen and Frank $25,000 each. Frank thinks that maybe Joan should quit her job so they can move to the country and have babies. This goes over like a lead balloon. Being stuck with kids while Frank is in the city with Helen sets her off. Joan and Frank have a vicious argument and Joan gets drunk. Frank has to go back to work so a drunken seething Joan goes out with Tony.
Sir Keith (Walter Rilla) runs the entire Low Temperature department. He’s not sold on the deep freeze experiments. At least on the possibility of freezing a human being. Sir Keith is all for forbidding any human experiments. Knowing that Sir Keith is about to pull the plug on the experiments Frank decides that he should be the next experiment. He instructs Helen and the other technicians to freeze him.
While Frank is being frozen the housekeeper finds Joan dead. When Police Inspector Prenton (Wolfgang Lukscky) and Sergeant Grun (Wolfgang Gunther) from the police come to the lab to question Frank they find he has been frozen. Now Prenton believes that Frank killed his wife and had himself frozen to escape justice. Prenton demands that Frank be thawed out.
“Frozen Alive” AKA “Der Fall X 701” or “Casefile no. 701” was released in 1964 and was directed by Bernard Knowles. It is a British, German co-production science fiction drama. The movie wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1966.
The movie is part science fiction, part soap opera and very much blah. There is no mystery here. You know exactly what happened all the way through. Most of the film is Frank and Joan arguing or Joan drunk and sloppy. As for the science fiction, we can freeze people but thawing them out is still in the future. The plot devise of cryogenics is not new. In this film it is used as a means to create tension. It appears that Helen believes he killed his wife and is contemplating letting him die rather than have him face arrest and prison. Other than that there isn’t much else to keep anyone interested.
The first person ever cryogenically frozen was James Hiram Bedford. He was an American psychology professor at the University of California. He was frozen in 1967 and is still preserved cryogenically at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.