Three Collaborations between Boris Karloff and Director Nick Grinde
      
The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) - 7.5



A terrific B gem here thanks to director Nick Grinde and actor Boris Karloff. It has an intriguing plot and Karloff takes it over the top with one of his masterly vocal performances. It is one of the few B films that I wish had had been longer. It was just gathering steam when it hit its time limit of 60 minutes. There were so many more people to die and it would have been lovely to stretch it out for another 20 minutes. Not that I am a ghoulish man but once you go down the road of multiple murders, you have to finish it. But mainly we have Karloff and the writers give him two great menacing literate speeches that may not be Shakespeare but are better than a B film deserves.



Karloff plays a good person here other than becoming mad and killing a bunch of people. He is Dr. Savaard, a humanitarian who has invented a heart device that will pump oxygen through a person and get their heart pumping again. It looks like something you could buy at Toys R Us but it will change everything. Of course, this is intended for dead people. Put them to death and operate on them and then bring them back to life. I think we can sort of do that now. Savaard was way ahead of his time! But to test this of course he needs a dead man. A fresh one. So he gets one of his students to volunteer - extra credits I assume - and he puts him to death. But just as he is about to bring him back to life - hopefully - the police come charging in and stop everything.



He goes on trial for murder - as science is too  - and when convicted and sentenced to be hanged he gives one of his speeches invoking Joan of Arc and others. And a subtle threat to come back and kill all the people involved. That's a lot of people - the jury, the judge, the prosecutor, the cop, the medical examiner - and if he has his way probably the prison cook. Well as you can see by the title they hang him but an assistant brings him back to life. But he isn't quite the same caring man. In fact, he is rather pissed and people start dying but it is going much too slowly for his taste and so the remaining people are all invited to his home and locked in. And the killings begin.



This is from Columbia so decent production values, not a lot of big names other than Karloff which is probably where most of the budget went - but there is Lorna Gray as his daughter, Don Beddoe as the cop and James Craig, who would go on to bigger roles, as one of the jurors. This was a tasty midnight snack.
Before I Hang (1940) - 6.0





Boris Karloff signed a five B picture deal with Columbia in 1939 and Nick Grinde was to direct three of them. All five were horror films (with one being a horror-comedy film) dealing with a scientist experimenting with life and death. In the first one which I saw the other day, The Man They Could Not Hang, Karloff plays a scientist who can bring back the recently dead. In this one he thinks he can bring youth to the old and dying. Interesting, in that at the time this was considered the material of mad scientists but now in fact doctors do induce death for certain operations and they are still working on a way to regenerate cells and life expectancy through our DNA. But back in 1939 playing God with human life only brought on tragedy. Thus the Mad Scientist film genre.



This one doesn't contain the suspense of The Man They Could Not Hang but it is still a solid film though in the hands of anyone but Karloff would have been fairly forgettable. You don't forget Karloff going from calm humble friend to a homicidal maniac in a few moments easily. Eyes bulging, sweat coming to a boil and the wringing of hands as he pulls out a cloth meant for death is what B horror films are all about. Some other folks are in the cast - Bruce Bennett and Evelyn Keyes - but though credited second and third they are nearly bit players as Karloff so dominates.




This one begins almost in the same manner as The Man They Could Not Hang. Dr. Garth (Karloff) is in the courtroom receiving his sentence for murder (from the same actor who played the Judge in The Man They Could Not Hang, Charles Trowbridge). A mercy killing of a friend who was in immense pain. He was working on a serum that would turn back age but it wasn't perfected so when his friend asked to die he complied. He has 30 days till he will be hanged. The prison doctor is intrigued by his theories and the two of them work together and right before he is about to take that long walk he takes the serum and at the same time finds out his sentence has been commuted. He collapses and wakes up to be a younger man. Success! Except for one small detail. The serum was mixed with the blood of a murderer and as we know murder lingers long in your blood and once there poisons everything. So be careful.
The Man with Nine Lives (1940) - 7.0




Well, not exactly nine lives. But still what's a little exaggeration in the scheme of things. This is the second chronologically of the three collaborations between director Nick Grinde and Boris Karloff for Columbia. But another name should be mentioned - Karl Brown who scripted all three films. They are well honed with some novel ideas, literate dialogue that is wonderfully absurd but seriously delivered and a few lovely moments given to Karloff with a wink and a nod. It is like he is saying to Karloff - here you go - blow it out of the water if you can. He does. Could the other horror icons at the time such as Lugosi or Lorre or Zucco have been as effective? I doubt it. Brown gives the characters in all three films a quiet menace who goes from normal to maniacal - but never loud or hysterical. In all three, Karloff's characters are good decent men whose search for knowledge takes them to a dark place. Perfect for Karloff.



I should not go overboard in my enthusiasm for this trilogy of mad scientist films - at the end of the day they are just what they were meant to be - B films that engage an audience for 60 minutes. But the difference between a Columbia B film such as this and one coming from Poverty Row can be immense. Columbia had a designated low budget unit but they still had a lot of resources to draw on in all facets of film making. These three should be looked at as a complete work as the theme of life and death seeps into all of them. Grinde never made it out of B films but besides these, two other films I have seen of his - Hitler - Dead or Alive and King of Chinatown  - make him a favorite in this low budget world.



The first two films dealt with medically putting someone into a state of death and bringing them back to life and then reversing aging - this one has to do with cryogenics - the ability to freeze a human and then unfreeze them. Just like I do with bread. All he wants is to advance science but as he says sometimes people have to die. Dr. Mason (Roger Pryor) is experimenting with freezing the body in order to cure cancer - what he calls Frozen Therapy. The film upfront makes the claim that in research for the film they discovered that in hospitals people are alive and breathing and encased in ice. Hmmm. Ok - sure - I will believe that if I have to. And the doctor puts a women to sleep for six days by constantly piling ice on her and keeping her frozen. But he needs more and with his pretty nurse (Jo Ann Sayers) goes looking for a doctor who was experimenting on this ten years ago before he disappeared.



They find him. In an ice chamber that photographs beautifully in black and white. Dr. Kravaal (Karloff) is frozen like a popsicle. They bring him back to life with coffee and he tells them there are four more frozen behind another door. They had come to arrest him ten years ago. And they still want to when they are dethawed - but he needs to finish his experiments  - he is so close and he needs subjects. Where can he find them? It gets morally very ambiguous and the last 20 minutes is great as Karloff goes into full Karloff mode - one scene in particular when he looks at our couple and says he needs more subjects and they realize he is talking about them is a classic. To scare your children into bed, all you need to do is show them Karloff's face as he looks at the couple like a prime roast.