Boris Karloff in The Man Who Lived Again (1936) “Most of me IS dead…The rest of me is damned.” or “If the monkeys eat you, don’t blame me!”

The Man Who Lived Again (1936) A forgotten British Gem from Gainsborough Pictures, was released on Sept. 11, 1936
it is also known as The Man Who Changed His Mind or by its US title Dr. Maniac Who Lived Again, or Dr. Maniac. Directed by Robert Stevenson.

Starring a chain-smoking Boris Karloff and pairing him with Anna Lee playing Dr. Clara Wyatt, Lee who would 10 years later co-star alongside him again as antagonists in the intensely riveting horror/noir film Bedlam (1946) Directed by Mark Robson and produced and scripted by the great man of shadow plays Val Lewton.

Anna Lee and Boris Karloff in Mark Robson’s/Val Lewton’s masterpiece Bedlam

Karloff plays Dr. Laurience a once brilliant and revered brain surgeon, turned renegade scientist, shunned by the scientific community, for his esoteric and profane ideas about the human brain. Dr. Laurience has created a way to transpose the mind of one person and place it into the body of another. In other words, Soul Transference. A very sacrilegious concept for his fellow scientists to support, without believing that Laurience is utterly insane. In this film, Karloff adheres more to the persona of the gruff Mad Scientist, rather than some of his other sympathetic roles as the misdirected man of science who meets with various obstructions and the unfortunate string of events. For instance, the kindly and altruistic Dr John Garth who is on death row for a mercy killing, in Before I Hang (1940)

The fabulous Musical Direction by Louis Levy and Art Direction by Vetchinksky has a charmingly nostalgic streak of that early 1930s milieu of the sinister.
Also starring is Cecil Parker as Dr. Gratton and Lyn Harding as Professor Holloway.

The film opens with several surgeons finishing up an operation, taking off their surgical gowns, one such to expose that of a female surgeon. As it is Dr. Clara Wyatt’s last surgery with her colleagues, they are saying their goodbyes. Continue reading “Boris Karloff in The Man Who Lived Again (1936) “Most of me IS dead…The rest of me is damned.” or “If the monkeys eat you, don’t blame me!””