This neat little Warner Brothers thriller with touches of science fiction and horror is the story of a group of legal eagles who find out that a man that they've sent to the electric chair (Boris Karloff) is innocent and delay their call to the governor to save his life. Scientist Edmund Gwenn, already convinced of his innocence, manages to bring him back through utilizing an experiment he was on the verge of perfecting, and the resurrected Karloff is a man who may or may not be obsessed with revenge. He confronts several of the men, including the one who framed him in the first place, and they die, but not as a result of his hands.
The insinuation here is that the men, so paranoid of his vengeance, drove themselves to their deaths. Warner Brothers, so adept in prison and gangster films, throws in a bit of Universal style horror to make a better than average "B" film with some good character performances (Barton MacLane is memorably malevolent as one of the criminals) and usual romantic hero Ricardo Cortez as a bad guy. Karloff gives a sympathetic portrayal a the victim of the law's evil ambitions. Gwenn's obsession with the idea of knowing what happened in the hour that Karloff was dead adds an interesting twist that should have the viewer thinking on a lot of different levels.
The insinuation here is that the men, so paranoid of his vengeance, drove themselves to their deaths. Warner Brothers, so adept in prison and gangster films, throws in a bit of Universal style horror to make a better than average "B" film with some good character performances (Barton MacLane is memorably malevolent as one of the criminals) and usual romantic hero Ricardo Cortez as a bad guy. Karloff gives a sympathetic portrayal a the victim of the law's evil ambitions. Gwenn's obsession with the idea of knowing what happened in the hour that Karloff was dead adds an interesting twist that should have the viewer thinking on a lot of different levels.