"The Haunted Strangler" has been compared to "Dr. Jeykll and Mr. Hyde" and to the Val Lewton horror productions at RKO, and it's easy to see why. Boris Karloff is Rankin, a novelist with a devoted wife and loving step-daughter. Twenty years after the hanging of the notorious Strangler, Rankin develops a theory that the hanged man wasn't guilty at all, but that it was the pathologist in the case, Tennant, who half-strangled and butchered those five women. With the help of a psychiatric intern, and against the advice of his friend Burke (Anthony Dawson), the police detective, Rankin investigates the case and finds evidence incriminating Tennant. Shortly after the Strangler's execution, Tennant was found to be suffering from fits of paralysis and violent outbursts, followed by amnesia for the events. Tennant was ensconced in a mental hospital but escaped with the help of a nurse who had fallen in love with him. About half-way through the film we learn that Rankin himself was Tennant, and his now loving wife was the nurse who helped him. But by this time Rankin has begun to suffer again the murderous paralytic rages and the amnesia that follows.
It gets kind of confused somewhere around here. Rankin's recent spells seem to be triggered by the scalpel that was missing from Tennant's collection of surgical instruments. When he grasps the scalpel, Rankin turns into a twisted wreck and he murders without reason. Poor Karloff's face wears a prosthetic or two that twists it all out of symmetry and gives him a look that is at once demonic and full of pain, as if he were suffering the grandfather of all abscessed teeth. On top of that his hair gets messed up. If he first set out to find Tennant guilty, he now must run around trying to convince others that he himself is Tennant.
Well, Jeykll and Hyde, yes. Tennant/Rankin is an upright man, no question about it, and his paralytic self is a raving, murderous animal who leaps about to a dissonant, tinkling score. The ego and the id. But Val Lewton, no. Everything in this film is overdone. The acting is in-your-face and not always convincing. The performance of the Newgate turnkey is positively painful. Rankin's butchery isn't as explicit as it would become in the slasher films but it is on-screen butchery. And there is an unnecessary scene of a prisoner being whipped at Newgate Prison. The whipper is a cliché -- a big, fat, bald, sweating sadist. The dialog is entirely functional, without the spark of any inspiration, and the period detail perfunctory. The direction is of the same quality, everything spelled out as if for an audience of children. The scenes in the madhouse are filled with the hoots and howls of the insane so that the hospital sounds more like a zoo. (Alas, this was likely to be too often true before the chemical straight jackets of phenothiazines were discovered in the 1950s. That was the second revolution in mental health. The first was the unchaining of the maniacs at La Bicetre by the humanitarian Philippe Pinel. Before that, they weren't zoos but infernos.) But then -- everybody seems to shout. They run, they shout, they wave their arms and disfigure their faces with emotions unless, like the intern, they are utter blanks.
In the end, I felt sorry for Karloff. The actor, not the character. He was seventy or thereabouts when this was shot and, as good natured as William Henry Pratt was, he probably joked about the role. Still, thirty years beyond Frankenstein and he's playing another monster.
It gets kind of confused somewhere around here. Rankin's recent spells seem to be triggered by the scalpel that was missing from Tennant's collection of surgical instruments. When he grasps the scalpel, Rankin turns into a twisted wreck and he murders without reason. Poor Karloff's face wears a prosthetic or two that twists it all out of symmetry and gives him a look that is at once demonic and full of pain, as if he were suffering the grandfather of all abscessed teeth. On top of that his hair gets messed up. If he first set out to find Tennant guilty, he now must run around trying to convince others that he himself is Tennant.
Well, Jeykll and Hyde, yes. Tennant/Rankin is an upright man, no question about it, and his paralytic self is a raving, murderous animal who leaps about to a dissonant, tinkling score. The ego and the id. But Val Lewton, no. Everything in this film is overdone. The acting is in-your-face and not always convincing. The performance of the Newgate turnkey is positively painful. Rankin's butchery isn't as explicit as it would become in the slasher films but it is on-screen butchery. And there is an unnecessary scene of a prisoner being whipped at Newgate Prison. The whipper is a cliché -- a big, fat, bald, sweating sadist. The dialog is entirely functional, without the spark of any inspiration, and the period detail perfunctory. The direction is of the same quality, everything spelled out as if for an audience of children. The scenes in the madhouse are filled with the hoots and howls of the insane so that the hospital sounds more like a zoo. (Alas, this was likely to be too often true before the chemical straight jackets of phenothiazines were discovered in the 1950s. That was the second revolution in mental health. The first was the unchaining of the maniacs at La Bicetre by the humanitarian Philippe Pinel. Before that, they weren't zoos but infernos.) But then -- everybody seems to shout. They run, they shout, they wave their arms and disfigure their faces with emotions unless, like the intern, they are utter blanks.
In the end, I felt sorry for Karloff. The actor, not the character. He was seventy or thereabouts when this was shot and, as good natured as William Henry Pratt was, he probably joked about the role. Still, thirty years beyond Frankenstein and he's playing another monster.