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"A fine art," says a racketeer of murder, cover-up is a finer one still, resurrection is the unknown one put forth at the crossroads of gangster and horror cinema. A musical but luckless soul is twice doomed by a judge, who first sends him to prison and later turns up dead in his car as part of an underworld frame-up. The crooked lawyer sent to defend him (Ricardo Cortez) instead "pushes the electric chair right under him," the only choice offered at death row is for his last wish. "You take away my life and offer a favor in return. That's what I call a bargain." Boris Karloff plays the unfortunate fellow so that the Frankenstein iconography is brought to bear on the scientist (Edmund Gwenn) who revives him, the medic's morbid curiosity is evocatively matched with the patient's cadaverous sadness. A return to the trembling of Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum for Michael Curtiz, the elided execution from 20,000 Years in Sing Sing is also seen (the governor's pardon reaches the warden's desk just as the lights flicker from the capital jolt). "The most incredible achievement in medical history" is a melancholy zombie moved by little besides vengeance, as he plays the piano his baleful gaze becomes a dollying camera that illuminates each gangland foe in close-up. Criminals begin dying in his presence, run over by trains or tumbling out of windows as he lurches accusatorily toward them, "the instrument of some supernatural power." The lineage includes The Man They Could Not Hang, The Man Who Could Cheat Death and, above all, Clark's Deathdream, which remembers Karloff's rainy trudge across the graveyard ("I belong here"). With Marguerite Churchill, Warren Hull, Barton MacLane, Henry O'Neill, and Joe Sawyer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |