The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)

Waste of time

Simply Perfect

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The first in a series of four Boris Karloff vehicles to have basically the same plot, "The Man They Could Not Hang" stars the horror icon as Dr. Henryk Savaard, who's experimenting on bringing people back to life with artificial hearts. (That does make this movie well ahead of its time.) He ends up charged with murder, convicted, and hanged. But an associate of his is able to resuscitate Savaard using his own techniques, and now the crazed Savaard is ripe for revenge.This movie doesn't play out quite the way that this viewer would have expected. It's rather slow to get going, and has a lot more talk than action, but it becomes great fun in its third act. Savaard doesn't go about stalking his victims, at least not all of them, but gathers a group of them together in an Old Dark House type situation. This whole sequence features some ingenious murdering devices."The Man They Could Not Hang" may be short on atmosphere, but what it does have is yet another absolutely marvelous Karloff performance. He was always at his best when it really looked like he was enjoying himself (see also "The Body Snatcher"), and here he makes the most of his material. The Savaard character is prone to giving speeches and taunting his victims, and the dialogue just rolls off Karloffs' tongue with ease.The supporting is good even when they have less interesting and showy roles to play. Beautiful Lorna Gray plays Savaards' daughter, Robert Wilcox is a stubborn reporter, Don Beddoe gruffly portrays the police lieutenant, Charles Trowbridge is solid as the huffy judge, and Ann Doran is cast as Betty, the young nurse who chooses to go behind Savaards' back.Other than a much too hasty and unsatisfying conclusion, this is enjoyable stuff worth catching for any fan of its star.Seven out of 10.

The film concerns Dr. Henryk Savaard, a man who has found a method of bringing the dead back to life by means of a mechanical heart. When he tries the method on a human subject, a medical student who volunteered, the police interfere and he is sentenced to death as they would not allow him the chance to revive his patient. Savaard however donates his body to science, more specifically, his assistant Lang who he trusted to do the try the experiment on himself. Lang revives Savaard and Savaard then turns to revenge, revenge on the people who put him to death in the first place.Karloff is masterful here, in what I think could be, or at least one of, his finest performances. He portrays Savaard as a man who loves his craft, a man who wants to help people and see's his method of eternal life as a gift that could make mankind better and stronger than it ever was. However , Karloff also portrays a different Savaard, a man who now see's mankind as undeserving of his gift and intends to take his secret of eternal life to his grave.The films first portion is much like Courtroom-Drama and includes one of Karloff's most well delivered monologues. First of helping people and trying to make the Jury understand why he did what he did, and then threatening and promising revenge on all the people who put him to death. The second portion is a revenge-thriller where Savaard traps all the remaining people he hasn't killed already in his house. Karloff's performance here is amazing, he says he is above the law, he says they are all going to die, in what order and what time exactly. The film is really tense after that and you start to wonder how could he possibly kill off these people in an exact order and at a specific time, well he does do it and it does get quite creative but sadly, only 2 people are killed before things get complicated. Thats my only real complaint with the film, I would have liked to have seen 1 or 2 more creative deaths before the final.Overall, The Man They Could Not Hang was a fantastic film for Karloff, who portrayed one of his most interesting characters and gave a performance to be remembered.

Man They Could Not Hang, The (1939) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Boris Karloff plays a crazed scientist who is obsessed with bringing the dead back to life. He tries his new machine on a dead college student but before he can bring the kid back to life the police show up and he is eventually sentenced to death. The scientist swears vengeance on the jury, judge and prosecutor if he can live through the hanging. This was the first of four "mad scientist" films that Karloff made for Columbia and it's certainly the weakest. The film starts off pretty well but it slowly grows tiresome and ends with a very poor finale, which is a cheat, silly and just comes off bad. Karloff is actually pretty good in the first half of the film as we see him really playing crazy like he wasn't offered too many times. Quite often he was the nice mad scientist but here is actually gets to come off pretty crazy and messed up in the head. This might take sympathy away from him for later in the film but I liked his character early on. The second half of the film turns into your typical revenge thriller and doesn't add anything new or original to the mix. The supporting cast is also rather disappointing even though Lorna Gray comes off fairly well. None of these Columbia films with Karloff are overly special but the good news here is that this one runs just over an hour, which makes for some mild entertainment but if you want to see classic Karloff then you'll have to look elsewhere.

This is the first of Karloff's cycle of "Mad Doctor" B-films for Columbia and, given that somehow I was under the impression that this was considered the least of them, I was surprised to find it great fun throughout. Essentially, all the films had similar plots (and it's interesting to see how the star's looks changed from one title to the next) - with Karloff on the verge of some great discovery or other but who's always thwarted at the proverbial 11th hour by thick-headed police and other figures of authority!; in fact, they're so teeth-grindingly stupid here that Karloff's conversion from dedicated scientist to cold-blooded killer was actually quite convincing!! The star is in really fine form in this film - especially effective when delivering his threatening final statement before the court passes sentence on him and then, following his resurrection (complete with broken neck a' la Bela Lugosi's Ygor!), when exacting his elaborate and sinister revenge plan. In fact, the second half - intriguingly modeled on Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None" - is even more entertaining than the first. seeing how it finds all who remain of Karloff's intended victims being locked up in one room of his house (with all exits having been systematically blocked and wired with electricity!) and allowing 15 minutes between one execution and the next. Of course, his plans go sadly awry in the end as he hadn't counted on the presence of his daughter (alerted to Karloff's reappearance by her snooping reporter boyfriend) and, when she eventually 'sacrifices' her life to save that of Karloff's unwilling guests, he sees the error of his ways and willingly accepts death anew from a bullet wound. Unfortunately, there's a hokey, tacked-on happy ending of sorts - with Karloff's daughter getting resurrected in the nick of time, through the use of his own invention, before he himself expires.