It's Double Feature night here at Criterion Reflections, as I slap together a second post in two consecutive days in order to mimic the proximity in which The Haunted Strangler and its second-billed counterpart Fiend Without a Face (reviewed yesterday) were released. Even though Criterion took its sweet time (seven years or so) in releasing the two films on DVD, they debuted on the same marquee back in the summer of 1958, courtesy of British producers Richard and Alex Gordon and their Amalgamated Productions company. While Fiend Without a Face went on to have a longer shelf-life and influential reputation, thanks primarily to its more unusual and innovative gore-splattering indulgences, The Haunted Strangler was given the top spot due to the presence of monster-movie hall of famer Boris Karloff.
The venerable old creepshow mainstay was well within the later stages of his career by the time he made himself available to the Gordon brothers, who were just getting into the production end of the movie business at the time. They respected (and needed) his fading star power enough to give him the kind of creative control and substantial salary he felt he deserved, and the result is a film that seems generally admired within the community of classic cinema horror buffs, though the reviews are still decidedly mixed. I am such a novice when it comes to Karloff's career and his performances that I won't venture an opinion as to where this film ranks among his lifetime achievements, but I thought even in the mere uttering of lines like "the women were only half-strangled, then slashed..." with that macabre lilt in his voice, he brought a degree of seasoning and charisma to his role that frankly was missing from Fiend Without a Face. That film succeeded in spite of the hackneyed acting on display, whereas The Haunted Strangler, being a more character-driven story, clearly benefited from having a figure of Karloff's stature to hold the tale together and raise the collective game of his fellow cast members as well.
The story involves an investigative novelist who's driven by a sense of justice to research the great unsolved killings of 19th century England. After a morbidly humorous opening depicting the execution by hanging of the "Haymarket Strangler" in 1860, we see the executed killer's tombstone age over the course of 20 years behind the opening credits. Enter Karloff as James Rankin, the aforementioned writer who operates on the hypothesis that poor people, once they're accused of a crime, have practically no recourse and are often unjustly convicted due to their lack of adequate legal representation. He's been harboring doubts about the verdict that sent the accused Haymarket Strangler to his death, and he's found a shaky trail of evidence to reinforce his suspicions that the true killer may still be on the loose.
The evidentiary trail leads through a few colorful milieus - a musty old hospital storehouse where the frail doctor charged with doing autopsies on both the accused killer... and his victims... abandoned some crucial personal belongings two decades earlier before disappearing without a trace; the Judas Hole, a sleazy cabaret where several of the victims worked as dancing girls in a low-rent cancan line; and an eerie old prison graveyard where the Strangler's corpse was hastily doused with quicklime one night and buried under the baleful light of the moon. The sinister atmospherics continually mount over the first half of the film as the plot twist grows ever more apparent - that Rankin's suspicions are correct, and that the killer is even closer - dreadfully closer - than he would ever wish would be the case...
So the story functions on a basic level as an exploration of how the ego defense mechanism of repression can go haywire in practically driving a man to split his personality. No particular cause for Rankin's psychic malady is offered, nor is the analysis sophisticated in any sense of the word. The audience is expected to accept and grapple with the twisted psyche of both the murderer who repressed his memories in order to put his crimes out of mind and the infatuated widow who enabled the killer's ruse and helped him construct a new false identity. But it's all clear and accessible enough for The Haunted Strangler's intended audience of thrill-seekers and veiled misogynists to readily comprehend, and probably mirrors their own murky mix of anxiety, shame, frustration and hostility toward themselves and their unfulfilled desires that prompted their interest in seeing a film that advertises itself thusly:
On a positive note, The Haunted Strangler features the most frolicsome dancing I've seen in a Criterion film since the end of Renoir's French Cancan. And yes, I'm not forgetting about A Dancer's World, which was exquisite to be sure, but not at all frolicsome. However, the music is just a little bit off from the famous and definitive cancan tune. The rights to the original were undoubtedly just a bit too expensive, but what they used was suitable enough, punctuated with excited feminine shrieking throughout.
Given the relative ham-handedness of the plot then, The Haunted Strangler held my interest primarily as an example of where the late 50s exploitation genre was heading: Gratuitous peep-show variety crotch shots of the dancing girls, pin-up babe Vera Day flaunting her champagne-soaked boobs, the flogging of prisoners accompanied by agonized howls and oozing bloody wounds, nocturnal grave-robbing, digging around in a dead man's bones searching for abandoned murder, hideous scenes at the insane asylum as patients and staff are abused in turn, with a guard slashed in face with broken glass, and several other "sickie" scenes.
The film's climax sees Karloff falling back on the role he knows so well, the hunted monster running loose in the world and wreaking havoc until he's finally stopped. In another notoriously cheap but relatively effective special effects move along the lines of Fiend Without a Face's invisible monsters, Karloff's Jekyl-to-Hyde transformation was pretty simple - just remove his false teeth, muss up his hair, trust in his ability to hold his face in a horrible over-bitten grimace for minutes at a time and turn him loose to lurch around for all he's worth. It may not look like much, but it takes a certain talent and a willingness to really let oneself go to pull it off as scary rather than ridiculous. Karloff had perfected that talent over a couple of decades, so it's only fitting that, even as his star receded a bit, that his performance here, and in a subsequent production (Corridors of Blood, also part of the Monsters and Madmen box set where The Haunted Strangler now resides), found its way into that unique expression of independent B-movie zeal that characterizes the Gordon brothers films and earned Boris his rightful place within the Criterion Collection.
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