This afternoon at the Barbican, I attended a screening of 'The Life Story of John Lee: The Man They Could Not Hang', with excellent live piano accompaniment by John Sweeney, as part of the opening day's programme for the Silent Film & Live Music Series running through June. This fascinating true-crime film was shown today on a double-bill with a digital restoration of 'The Story of the Kelly Gang' (1906), generally believed to be the first feature-length movie.
The bizarre story of John Lee was once well-known fodder for the penny-dreadfuls, but has now sunk to the level of 'Believe it or not' lore. On 15 November 1884, an elderly woman named Emma Keyse was found dead in her cottage in South Devon, clearly a homicide. The house had been fired deliberately. Yet Keyse's possessions appeared to be untouched; apparently the killer's motive was something other than robbery.
The police promptly arrested 20-year-old John Lee, who had occasionally worked for Keyse. His trial was a local sensation, made even more sensational shortly afterward when Lee's barrister and a Crown witness both went insane and died.
Lee was convicted and sentenced to hang. On 23 February 1885, he went to the scaffold ... but something went wrong. The trap refused to open. Lee was taken back to his cell. The trap was tested with weights; it worked perfectly. Try again, shall we? Lee was brought back. Again, he mounted the steps to the scaffold. Again, it failed to work. Three times in all, the trap failed ... yet it worked perfectly each time it was tested.
There seems to be a widespread misconception that, when an execution apparatus malfunctions, the prisoner is set free. In fact, Lee's death sentence was changed to life imprisonment. Insisting all along on his innocence, he was eventually released in 1907. Four years later, with a local barmaid named Kate (surname uncertain), he emigrated to America. Some sources claim that he eventually returned, dying in a West Devon workhouse in 1945: this has not been verified.
This crude 1912 silent film was made in Australia, which explains the film's viewpoint. Most of Australia's white inhabitants at this time were direct descendants of convicts who had been transported from Ireland or England: criminals who, very often, had committed only very minor crimes, or who may even have been innocents falsely convicted. The makers of this movie take every opportunity to depict the Devonshire authorities as corrupt, incompetent, utterly uninterested in such petty details as facts or procedural evidence. As depicted here by the rather effete Mervyn Barrington, John Lee is not merely innocent: he is the people's hero.
Most howlingly of all, this film's editing and direction strongly imply that the malfunction of Lee's gallows is an outright case of divine intervention, with God personally protecting Lee from the hangman ... or perhaps the trap door is kept fast by some superhuman exertion of Lee's will power. This is utter rubbish, of course. It's quite possible that a Victorian gallows would repeatedly fail, with the erratic behaviour of this particular gallows -- working perfectly in tests, yet always failing in a real context -- being only slightly coincidental. If God (or any other supernatural agency) really intervened in the execution of John Lee, then why did no deity intervene to save Timothy Evans (the fall-guy in the John Christie murders), or Leo Frank (lynched for the Mary Phagan rape-murder), or any of the many other innocents who were executed for crimes they didn't commit, or who were lynched outright? I try to rate films based on their effectiveness at what they attempt to do, rather than their factuality. 'The Life Story of John Lee' plainly intended to tell only one side of a very skewed story, and on that count it succeeds very well. The screening which I attended was made more enjoyable by John Sweeney's excellent piano accompaniment. All in all, I'll rate this experience 8 out of 10.
The bizarre story of John Lee was once well-known fodder for the penny-dreadfuls, but has now sunk to the level of 'Believe it or not' lore. On 15 November 1884, an elderly woman named Emma Keyse was found dead in her cottage in South Devon, clearly a homicide. The house had been fired deliberately. Yet Keyse's possessions appeared to be untouched; apparently the killer's motive was something other than robbery.
The police promptly arrested 20-year-old John Lee, who had occasionally worked for Keyse. His trial was a local sensation, made even more sensational shortly afterward when Lee's barrister and a Crown witness both went insane and died.
Lee was convicted and sentenced to hang. On 23 February 1885, he went to the scaffold ... but something went wrong. The trap refused to open. Lee was taken back to his cell. The trap was tested with weights; it worked perfectly. Try again, shall we? Lee was brought back. Again, he mounted the steps to the scaffold. Again, it failed to work. Three times in all, the trap failed ... yet it worked perfectly each time it was tested.
There seems to be a widespread misconception that, when an execution apparatus malfunctions, the prisoner is set free. In fact, Lee's death sentence was changed to life imprisonment. Insisting all along on his innocence, he was eventually released in 1907. Four years later, with a local barmaid named Kate (surname uncertain), he emigrated to America. Some sources claim that he eventually returned, dying in a West Devon workhouse in 1945: this has not been verified.
This crude 1912 silent film was made in Australia, which explains the film's viewpoint. Most of Australia's white inhabitants at this time were direct descendants of convicts who had been transported from Ireland or England: criminals who, very often, had committed only very minor crimes, or who may even have been innocents falsely convicted. The makers of this movie take every opportunity to depict the Devonshire authorities as corrupt, incompetent, utterly uninterested in such petty details as facts or procedural evidence. As depicted here by the rather effete Mervyn Barrington, John Lee is not merely innocent: he is the people's hero.
Most howlingly of all, this film's editing and direction strongly imply that the malfunction of Lee's gallows is an outright case of divine intervention, with God personally protecting Lee from the hangman ... or perhaps the trap door is kept fast by some superhuman exertion of Lee's will power. This is utter rubbish, of course. It's quite possible that a Victorian gallows would repeatedly fail, with the erratic behaviour of this particular gallows -- working perfectly in tests, yet always failing in a real context -- being only slightly coincidental. If God (or any other supernatural agency) really intervened in the execution of John Lee, then why did no deity intervene to save Timothy Evans (the fall-guy in the John Christie murders), or Leo Frank (lynched for the Mary Phagan rape-murder), or any of the many other innocents who were executed for crimes they didn't commit, or who were lynched outright? I try to rate films based on their effectiveness at what they attempt to do, rather than their factuality. 'The Life Story of John Lee' plainly intended to tell only one side of a very skewed story, and on that count it succeeds very well. The screening which I attended was made more enjoyable by John Sweeney's excellent piano accompaniment. All in all, I'll rate this experience 8 out of 10.
