Crew
Director – Nick Grinde, Screenplay – Robert D. Andrews, Story – Robert D. Andrews & Karl Brown, Photography (b&w) – Benjamin Kline, Art Direction – Lionel Banks. Production Company – Columbia.
Cast
Boris Karloff (Dr John Garth), Evelyn Keyes (Martha Garth), Bruce Bennett (Dr Paul Ames), Edward Van Sloan (Dr Ralph Howard), Ben Taggart (Warden Thompson), Pedro de Cordoba (Victor Sondini), Wright Kramer (George Wharton), Bertram Marbaugh (Stephen Barclay), Don Beddoe (Captain McGraw), Frank Richards (Otto Kron)
Plot
The aging Dr John Garth is on trial for performing a mercy killing of a friend. Garth is found guilty and sentenced to be executed. While he waits in jail, the prison doctor Ralph Howard persuades the warden to allow Garth to continue his experiments into the search for a cure for aging. A laboratory is set up and Garth synthesises a serum, using the blood of an executed murderer. Just before his execution, Garth decides to inject himself with the serum. Garth’s execution is then commuted at the last minute. However, the influence of the murderer’s blood causes Garth to change whereupon he kills Howard and another prisoner. With Garth having no memory of what happened, this is blamed on the other prisoner. Garth is released and sets about resuming his experiments. He pleads with his elderly friends that he can reverse the effects of aging. However, the murderer’s blood drives Garth to kill again.
Boris Karloff became one of the key names in the so-called Golden Age of Horror in the 1930s, ever since appearing as the Frankenstein monster in Universal’s Frankenstein (1931). Karloff went on to a lengthy career as a horror icon that lasted up until his death in 1969. Karloff’s friend/screen rival at the time was Bela Lugosi who had appeared in Universal’s Dracula (1931). The two made eight films together.
For Lugosi, the 1940s represented a marked decline in the quality of many of his films, a period when he was also suffering drug addiction. For Karloff, the same period was marked by a well above average series of B films – his output during this period seems a whole class away from Lugosi’s, even though both were traipsing through the same mad scientist roles. Before I Hang was one of several films Karloff made at Columbia, along with The Black Room (1935), The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), The Man With Nine Lives (1940), The Devil Commands (1941) and The Boogie Man Will Get You (1942), all of which are better than average.
The plot of Before I Hang seems to have been constructed to mash together strands from several other horror tropes of this era. Karloff is a Mad Scientist, although unlike the ones usually played by Lugosi, Karloff’s scientists were usually cuddly, well-meaning grandfatherly types. Here he invents a rejuvenation serum. In a plot device taken somewhat from The Hands of Orlac (1924) or Mad Love (1935), he adds the blood of a murderer to the mix. This causes Karloff to randomly become a murderer at various points, which pushes the film into being a Jekyll and Hyde film of sorts.
There are a good many contrivations that get packed into the film’s brief 62-minute running time. Karloff is sentenced to prison to be executed; a well-meaning prison doctor outfits him with a laboratory to further his experiments; Karloff injects himself with the serum just before he is to be executed – you suspect it would be hard to obtain any meaningful research results when he does this only minutes before the scheduled time – only for the execution to be commuted; in the meantime, the serum causes personality swings and Karloff murders the doctors and an inmate, which is conveniently blamed on the inmate. He is released and continues his experiments. After this point, the film becomes improbably contorted. In another work, this would simply become a revenge plot, with Karloff’s scientist eliminating the colleagues who once ridiculed him. Instead, he improbably tries to persuade the his colleagues to take the serum, only for the transformation to overtake him while doing so and he to turn and kill them.
If the plot is an awkward Frankenstein-monster like patchwork creation, then at least Karloff works hard in his sharp delineations between kindly old man and sinisterly smiling. The film’s lighting schemes do a good deal of work to help him. Before I Hang has been given a beautifully crisp dvd restoration that renders the black-and-white lighting as something wonderfully moody, especially in the shots when the camera closes in on Karloff’s underlit face as he starts to change personalities.
Nick Grinde (1893-1979) had a career as a director of musicals and Westerns, making 48 films between 1928 and 1945. He made two other Boris Karloff mad scientist films at Columbia with The Man They Could Not Hang (1939) and The Man With Nine Lives (1940).
Full film available here