PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
MAN WITH NINE LIVES is close to being a
reprise of Boris Karloff’s previous “mad scientist” film for
Columbia, THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG. This was a pleasing if
unremarkable story of Henryk Saavard, a dedicated doctor who
perfected a way to bring patients back from death. The state thinks
that he’s killed a patient and so they hang him. A confederate
steals Saavard’s body and brins him back to life, after which he
traps the judge and jury wwho unfairly slew him, and kills several of
them before he’s stopped. In my review of HANG I thought it the
best of the Columbia “mad doctor cycle.” I’ve changed my mind, for
though writer Karl Brown re-uses many of the tropes of his earlier
script, the arrangement is much more than just another vengeful
killer film.
NINE begins with a mystery: Leon
Kravaal, a doctor who claimed to have perfected the science we now
call cryonics, disappeared ten years ago, along with four men who had
accused him of freezing a patient to death (analogues of Saavard and
his condemning jury). Tim Mason, a doctor who admires the missing
doctor’s theories, takes his nurse-fiancee Judith to Kravaal’s
abaonded home, and the two of them find what the police of ten years
ago could not: a secret passage leading to a cryogenic chamber. Tim
and Judith soon discover five men—Kravaal and his accusers—and,
upon thawing them out, find that they’re all alive.
Director Nick Grinde approaches the
material in the same adequate manner he did for the previous film,
but this time Brown makes his tragic doctor more appealing. Upon
being revived, Kravaal theorizes that he accidentally exposed all of
them to a unique combination of chemicals, allowing them to survive
the deep freeze. The other four men, all of whom were willing to
condemn Kravaal out of hand, find that they’ve lost ten years of
their lives, and that they’re all legally dead. One of them
destroys Kravaal’s notes, and in retaliation the maddened scientist
decides to use his unwelcome guests as guinea pigs.
The romantic couple proves a bit of a
drag, though Mason’s conflicted feelings about Kravaal’s
accomplishments keep him from being just another bland leading man.
Of the support-cast, Byron Foulger excels in playing his go-to
character type, the insufferable martinet. But the show is Karloff’s
all the way, though Brown’s script gives the actor a better
sampling of good lines than Karloff usually got from his B-films.
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