Sat 14 Jun 2014
Movie Review: THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG (1939) with BORIS KARLOFF.
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews , Science Fiction & Fantasy[7] Comments
THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG. Columbia Pictures, 1939. Boris Karloff, Lorna Gray, Robert Wilcox, Roger Pryor, Don Beddoe, Ann Doran, Jo De Stefani, Charles, Trowbridge, Byron Foulger. Director: Nick Grinde.
If in Night Key (reviewed recently here) Boris Karloff was a bumbling but revengeful old inventor who was seriously wronged, he was at heart a kindly old gentleman with (as I made a point in mentioning) a beautiful daughter. In The Man They Could Not Hang, Mr. Karloff is a scientist, not an inventor, and even before he is serious wronged (see below) he doesn’t have the best of dispositions to begin with.
But after he is hanged (see the title), his quest for revenge upon the jury, the judge, prosecutor, and the members of the police force who helped convict him turns him into a mad scientist whose vengeance is clever, wicked and just plain diabolical.
His crime? That of killing a medical student who had willingly agreed to become the subject of Dr. Henryck Savaard’s latest experiment – a crucial one indeed, one in which the student is put to death under controlled conditions, expecting to waken again by means of a strange, weird-looking apparatus in Savaard’s laboratory.
The police are summoned before the test of the equipment is completed, however, and their intervention means the student cum guinea pig is doomed to a permanent death.
The middle third of the movie is the slowest moving one, taking place as it does in the courtroom, with plenty of room for the prosecutor and Dr. Savaard to speak their views and respond to the other’s. Savaard suggests that being able to bring patients back to life on the operating table would mean more lives saved during surgery; nix on that, says the D.A.: a death is a death, and murder is murder.
The last third of the film could have been the most fun, with many of well-recovered Dr. Savaard’s would-be victims locked up together in a booby-trapped house, and for the most part is it is, but the ending seems rushed. Here (not so coincidentally) is also where the mad scientist’s beautiful daughter comes into play – an essential role, to be sure, but one well telegraphed in advance.
June 14th, 2014 at 4:32 pm
Lorna Gray went on to a fairly nice career under the name Adrian Booth at Republic. Later married David Brian — and she is still with us. A real beauty.
June 14th, 2014 at 4:48 pm
It should be noted, for anyone who hasn’t seen the film, that Lorna Gray played the beautiful daughter, not surprisingly.
June 15th, 2014 at 12:02 am
Director Nick Grinde would go on to direct Karloff in another movie one year later entitled . . . “Before I Hang” about a physician on trial for a mercy killing and who ends up on death row.
Anybody seen this one?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032245/
June 15th, 2014 at 12:07 am
When I was a kid, one of the local papers’ TV listings would sometimes include one-sentence reviews (syndicated, I’d guess) of old movies to be shown.
I’ve always remembered the capsule review of “The Man They Could Not Hang”:
“They should have tried harder.”
June 15th, 2014 at 6:14 pm
I understand that the artificial heart was inspired by the artificial heart that had recently been co-created by Charles Lindbergh.
The daughter is far more heroic and proactive than was the norm for horror flicks of that era. Reminds me a bit of Anna Lee in Karloff’s 30s flick THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND.
Although it is basically setting up the story for Karloff’s revenge, the middle bit of the story is fairly uncompromising in its criticisms of the judicial process. Everyone is either stupid or actively malevolent. If a mainstream movie had tried this it would have received much more notice for its anti-establishment stance.
June 16th, 2014 at 4:05 pm
This and a couple of Karloff’s revenge films were awfully sour tempered affairs, more social criticism than suspense and certainly not horror. Here I don’t know what they were trying to do because Karloff is never sympathetic, although the jaundiced view of justice and the court system is typical of the era ala Lawyer Man, Fury, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, and even Talk of the Town.
That late Depression era was not enamored of government at any level save maybe the FBI (only because Hoover was a master propagandist who had something on everyone)and the military. So many people had their homes taken by the courts and the sheriff that respect for those institutions was at its lowest ebb. That’s one reason Perry Mason busted out and became a bestseller, he took on the corruption and indifference as well as the juggernaut of the law that oppressed the people, at least in their view.
June 17th, 2014 at 1:07 am
Karloff’s character as Dr. Savaard isn’t remotely sympathetic in the courtroom. He comes across as arrogant and as a know-it-all. And, unfortunately, that scene goes on for way too long. There’s definitely a way to make a man in his position seem sympathetic to jurors (and to the audience), but the writers chose to make him as somewhat unbearable. The thing is: it’s not really a horror film, per se. Hard to say exactly what it is. But it’s clever. To an extent