Synopsis: A prominent New York businessman is gunned down on the street in front of a ritzy hotel. The gunman flees the scene and the police have no leads. Reporters are lounging in the police station lobby, waiting for news, when a shy-looking man comes in and tells the sergeant at the desk that he was the one who committed the crime, and would like to confess.
The man identifies himself as Lawrence Fontaine (Lewis Stone), an actor who arrived in town the previous month from Australia, and who is appearing in a play called “The Death Cry” at the Temple Theater. But chief of of the homicide division Walter Reid (Robert Gleckler) immediately knows Fontaine’s confession is false. The gunman fired the shots with his left hand, but Fontaine is right-handed. The killer had left a number of cigarette butts on the ground in the place outside the hotel where he’d waited for his victim; Fontaine doesn’t smoke. And in Fontaine’s confession, he claimed that he’d thrown the murder weapon into the river from the Jersey City Ferry around 1:20 am, but Reid knows the ferry doesn’t run from 12:30 to 5:00.
Soon the police apprehend the real killer, and Reid warns Fontaine not to waste police time and resources in search of publicity. But a few nights later, another prominent murder takes place. Fontaine again shows up at police headquarters and confesses, but this time the police reject his story immediately because Fontaine refers to the murder victim as “she” — Fontaine had incorrectly assumed that the victim, whose first name was Francis, was a woman.
But we learn that Fontaine has made these two confessions as part of an elaborate murder plot. At the theater, Fontaine’s dresser Jocko (Forrester Harvey) shows him a newspaper story: a man named George Bradley (Jameson Thomas) has taken up residence in the penthouse of the hotel next door. Fontaine opens a box and begins perusing old letters and newspaper clippings — which show us that Fontaine’s ex-wife, who had married Bradley, wrote to Fontaine confiding that she was afraid of her new husband. A short time later, she drowned under suspicious circumstances.
Meanwhile, Bradley and his sister Amelia (Marjorie Main) fret over the fact that Bradley’s stepson Tommy (Tom Brown) has caught the acting bug, and will be appearing in the new play “The Death Cry” at the Temple. As a favor to Tommy, they will attend the show that night.
Backstage, Tommy points out his stepfather in the audience to Fontaine, who is shocked to recognize him as Bradley.
The next day, Tommy has an altercation with Bradley, and the two come to blows. That night, while pretending to nap in his dressing room before the show, Fontaine slips out the window, goes up to Bradley’s penthouse, shoots him, and returns to the show just as his dresser is knocking on the door.
When news of Bradley’s murder hits the papers, Fontaine goes to the police station to confess. But this time the police won’t even bother hearing him out, and tell him not to come back.
Bradley’s servants tell police that Tommy had gotten into a fistfight with his stepfather the day he was murdered, and had even threatened him. Tommy is arrested, put on trial, and found guilty of murder. But when Fontaine tries to exonerate Tommy by confessing again, he finds the police won’t believe him….
Comments: One of the more obscure titles from the original Shock! package, The Man Who Cried Wolf isn’t a horror movie, nor can it fairly be called a murder mystery. It’s really a backstage melodrama with a premise almost too clever for its own good. Lots of coincidences need to pile up in order to make it work, and for this reason the movie takes a while to get going. But once it does, it works pretty well, as long as you’re in the mood to suspend disbelief.
On the surface, Fontaine’s plan to make a bunch of false confessions in order to remove himself from police suspicion later on seems like a good one. But if you think about it for even a minute it starts to fall apart. There’s little risk in confessing to a murder you didn’t commit if the cops you’re dealing with are honest and competent. But what if they aren’t? They might decide to accept your confession at face value — and you might wind up getting the electric chair.
And even if you temporarily managed to ward off suspicion with the false confession, you’d definitely pop back up to #1 on the list of suspects once a connection — any connection — surfaced between you and the latest murder victim. Even a fairly unimaginative cop would be able to piece Fontaine’s scheme together after that.
Fontaine had already waited 20 years to exact his revenge, so calling attention to himself now seems like a bad option. He had arranged an alibi in the theater on the night in question anyway, so why get fancy about it? Well, of course he’s an actor, so perhaps we should allow for his flair for the dramatic.
All in all, this is a decent little film that doesn’t demand a whole lot, and would have made for a pleasant night at the movies for Depression-era audiences.
Lewis Stone is best known for the role of Judge Hardy in the Andy Hardy films, but that role still lay in the future for him (the first film in the series, A Family Affair, was released a few months before The Man Who Cried Wolf, but the role of Andy’s dad was played by Lionel Barrymore).
Tom Brown is the nice kid wrongly convicted of murder here, and he carries the less-than-demanding role pretty well. He spent much of his career playing character roles on television.
Marjorie Main also had a durable film career as a character actor, with lots of roles as landladies and spinster aunts. She’s probably best remembered for playing opposite Percy Kilbride in the Ma and Pa Kettle movies.
Synopsis: Dr. Charles Randolph (John Carradine) lives comfortably in a large seaside house with his wife Elaine (Claudia Drake). Working in the basement with an array of high-voltage appliances, Randolph and his assistant David (Robert Shayne) are trying to find a method of bringing the dead back to life.
As the movie opens, Randolph and David are trying to restore to life a drowned sailor they found washed up on the shore. David is uneasy with this, fearing that they have crossed a moral line; but Randolph insists that they can’t do any harm to a man who’s already dead. As they apply higher and higher voltages to the body, Randolph notes that the face of the sailor has taken on a stone-like appearance. As the two men watch, the sailor sits up, then stands, but suddenly collapses, dead. The experiment has failed, but Randolph feels they were very close to success. He notes that the electrical generator has burned out, and he goes into town to get a replacement.
The next day the local chief of police comes to visit Randolph, who had earlier alerted the authorities a body had washed up on the shore. The chief says the sailor Randolph found died under curious circumstances — an autopsy has revealed he was electrocuted. Furthermore, the sheriff notes that Randolph had gone into town to buy a replacement generator, and he wonders if there is a connection. Randolph tries to laugh it off, but it’s clear that the police chief is suspicious.
Meanwhile, we learn that Elaine has fallen in love with David. Randolph is entirely unaware of this; and David’s behavior is quite above-board, but the Randolph’s maid Maria, who’s very loyal to Elaine, practices voodoo, and plants a doll under David’s pillow – one that she believes will make him fall in love with her mistress. Meanwhile, Dr. Randolph, noticing David’s growing uneasiness around the house, arranges for David’s girlfriend Linda (Maris Wrixon) to come and visit. This only increases the tension in the household, and before long Linda becomes troubled by the house’s odd vibe and leaves.
Dr. Randolph decides to try the experiment again — this time on Elaine’s beloved Great Dane Brutus. He and David fail to revive the dog. But before long, they hear Brutus barking from another room. The dog is alive, but somehow changed: it has an odd, stony faced appearance, seems to have turned savage in the presence of humans, and has an odd ability to walk through walls.
Unexpectedly, Elaine dies, and Dr. Randolph can only think of one way to save her –by reviving her the same way he revived Brutus, and suffer the consequences, whatever they may be….
Comments: By my reckoning this is only the third Horror Incorporated broadcast of The Face of Marble. It’s not surprising that the programmers at KSTP weren’t eager to show it more than they had to; if I were running a TV station I’d feel the same way.
The problem with The Face of Marble isn’t that it’s bad (though it isn’t good, exactly); it’s that it never quite figures out what sort of movie it wants to be, and lurches from one disconnected plot point to another until time runs out. Using electricity to revive the dead and stealing corpses for the experiments is borrowed from countless movies that in turn borrowed from Frankenstein; the voodoo maid could have come from Night of Terror or I Walked With a Zombie or a dozen other movies. The small-town chief of police who keeps stopping by for friendly “chats” about sinister doings about town is equal parts The Devil Commands and Son of Frankenstein.
Only two plot points come across as even slightly original. The love triangle stands out because it’s Elaine, not one of the men, who wants to change the romantic equation. In this era, women characters were distinctly lacking in agency, particularly involving matters of sexuality. By introducing Maria and her black magic, the movie cheats a bit, taking some of the onus off Elaine. But there’s no way around the fact that Elaine hungers for something she doesn’t have and which society says she shouldn’t want. And this is made more interesting by the fact that the movie chooses not to stack the deck against her husband, Dr. Randolph. He is not depicted as a jerk or a boor. To the contrary, he is charming and generous to those around him, certainly more likable and lively a character than stuffed-shirt David.
The other point of interest is the mysterious transformation of Brutus. The dog’s personality changes as a result of the experiment — he becomes savage — and he also gains the ability to move through solid objects, which even for a movie like this is an unexpected side effect. And so it’s a bit novel to have the dog wandering around the house, walking through solid walls. And later, when Elaine inevitably undergoes the same treatment, she and the dog become a tag team, moving through solid objects like ghosts in a spooky seaside manor.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m not a John Carradine fan but I have to admit that I liked him here. He plays a character not unlike the one he played in The Invisible Man’s Revenge, which perhaps not coincidentally was the other Carradine performance I liked. I never find the man’s evil characters interesting or compelling, but for some reason I find him more believable as a good-natured (but slightly naive) tinkerer.
Claudia Drake is perfectly acceptable as Elaine, and Robert Shayne gets all of his lines right as David.
The Horror Incorporated Project 