Format: Internet video on Fire!
I am a horror fan, but I’m finding more and more that I’m shying away from things that are explicitly and gratuitously gory. I don’t mind gore when it makes sense in the narrative, but I don’t see the point of the fan service when it’s there just to be there. Because of this, there is a real comfort in horror films from the 1930s and ‘40s. The Man They Could Not Hang came out in the glorious film year of 1939, and it’s one of those films that is right in the wheelhouse of its star, Boris Karloff. There’s a menace here that works really well—remade today this would be a lot bloodier, but it’s a story that would work today.
Like many horror films of the time, The Man They Could Not Hang is rooted firmly in the idea of the progress of medicine and medical experimentation. Dr. Henryk Savaard (Karloff) has experimented with the idea of bringing the dead back to life. He’s gotten a young medical student name Bob Roberts (Stanley Brown) to be his test subject—he’ll be temporarily killed and kept alive with an artificial heart. The idea is that this would allow doctors to perform procedures impossible on living patients, and then allow those patients to be revived.
The problem happens with Bob’s fiancée, Betty Crawford (Ann Doran) runs to the police. The police show up and stop the experiment, Bob dies, and Savaard is taken into custody, tried for murder, convicted, and hanged. Before his death, he donates his body to science, which in this case means that he has donated his body to Lang (Byron Foulger), his assistant. As you are almost certainly guessing, Lang uses the artificial heart to revive Savaard, but also fixes his broken neck first, an operation that would have been impossible had Savaard been alive.
That essentially covers the first half of the film. The second half is Savaard’s revenge. The people who sat on his jury start turning up dead, evidently having committed suicide by hanging, something noticed by a newspaper reporter named Scoop Foley (Robert Wilcox). This looks like a weird coincidence from the outside, but we’ve all seen a movie before. At this point, we haven’t yet seen the revived Savaard, but we know the name of the film and we can tell where this is going.
The remaining jurors, the district attorney (Roger Pryor), the judge from the trial (Charles Trowbridge), and Betty Crawford (and Scoop, who forces his way in) again and can kill them all with impunity since his alibi—he’s been dead for three months—is completely unimpeachable. All of his plans become jeopardized when his daughter Janet (Lorna Gray) shows up at the house as well.
It’s a fantastic idea for a film, and it’s put forward in a compact, 64-minute package. It has a fun medical angle, police stupidity, a court that produces a verdict that makes sense but that the audience knows is stupid, people acting badly (specifically I’m referring to Betty, who demands the police stop the experiment and then demands that they allow the experiment to continue), and a fun revenge angle. In fact, the revenge is really interesting. Savaard has everyone sit down to dinner and then announces that all of their seat assignments list the order that they will die in and the time at which they will die. And then they start dying on schedule.
The truth is, this is a solid little thriller. It could genuinely stand to be longer, although it does tell the complete story and does so quite efficiently. Flesh this out another 20 minutes or so, and it would make a pretty good B-movie today, and with the right cast, it could be really entertaining. You’d need to find someone who could match Karloff’s combination of pathos and menace—Willem Dafoe or Jeremy Irons could pull the role off extremely well.
It's fun to go into something like this cold. It’s rare that one of these movies has a science/medical angle that seems just barely plausible enough to be interesting (kind of—we’re told that Lang broke the artificial heart because rigor mortis had set in, and Savaard comes back with no brain damage, but still…), and the screenplay has just enough inventiveness to sell a really upsetting situation.
The Man They Could Not Hang won’t be everyone’s taste, but it’s got a lot going for it. I was more than pleasantly surprised by it.
Why to watch The Man They Could Not Hang: It’s a surprisingly fun and effective movie despite being more than 80 years old.
Why not to watch: Boy, this could use another 20 minutes.
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