Physician and scientist Dr. John Garth has been found guilty of murder after performing a mercy killing on a patient whose advanced age had left him in unbearable pain, a malady he'd hoped to cure through his research into how old age works. He's then sentenced to die by hanging in one month but, a week into his stint on death row, he learns that he'll be able to continue his research in the remaining time he has left, as the prison's doctor, Ralph Howard, has convinced the warden to allow him to do so, feeling that the goal of his work could be of great benefit to mankind. Working together, the two scientists come up with a successful batch of the serum that Garth feels stave off the aging process and, when they run out of it, he asks Howard to make up some more using the blood of an executed inmate. Come the evening of his execution, Garth is intent upon ensuring that all of his efforts don't go to waste and decides to inoculate himself with the serum, feeling he has nothing to lose if the results prove deadly. Just as he's being taken away to be hanged, the warden receives a phone call and learns that the governor has commuted Garth's sentence to life in prison. He then begins to feel the effects of the serum and collapses, awakening some time later in the prison's infirmary. When he does, he's astonished to realize that he no longer needs his glasses to read and that his hair has gone from completely white to a salt-and-pepper color pattern. Rejoiced at the notion that he's no longer living on borrowed time, Garth decides to continue his research and next test the serum out on Howard. When he attempts to do so, however, Garth begins to feel strange and is then filled with an uncontrollable need to kill, strangling Howard to death. He also attacks and kills Otto, the custodian, and blacks out to wake up in the hospital. Garth has no memory of what he did and so, the authorities come to believe that Howard was murdered by Otto. Garth's luck continues when the governor grants him a complete pardon and he's allowed to go back home with his daughter, Martha. Despite this, Garth is troubled by his inability to remember what happened in the prison laboratory and it isn't long before the same urge to kill, the result of the violent inmate's blood in his system, returns and threatens the live of his colleagues and even Martha.
So steadfast is Garth in his feeling that old age is caused by the exertion of simply living on the human cells, which creates a pile up of poisons that eventually kill the body, and that a serum derived from the material of the cells through the blood can stave off the aging process that, when presented with the chance to continue his research in the three weeks that he has left, he's more than happy to go ahead with it, despite being initially shocked by the proposal. Eventually, he and Dr. Ralph Howard come up with a serum that does successfully enter the bloodstream through the heart and, in his excitement at this prospect, asks Howard to use an executed inmate's blood to create another serum they can use. As his execution draws closer, Garth, despite having accepted his fate, worries that Howard won't be able to understand his notes and, with only a few hours left, asks to be allowed to spend it in the laboratory alone with him. His biggest concern being how the serum will react within a human body, Garth decides to inoculate himself with it, feeling that it won't mean anything if it proves deadly, since he's going to die anyway, and also feels that Howard can learn more from his body afterward. Despite Howard's reservations, Garth persuades him to go through with it, but just as it begins to take effect within him and they observe what's going on, the time for his execution arrives. Before he can be escorted to the gallows, Garth is surprised to learn that his sentence has been commuted to life in prison, when he collapses from the serum. Waking up in the prison's infirmary some time later, he learns that he became delirious and had violent convulsions after being in a coma for twelve hours, and is then ecstatic to see that the serum has had a hand in reversing the aging process in him. Encouraged by this, he means to go on with his work, feeling he has all the time he could possibly want to continue, and next decides to inoculate Howard with the serum. But, when they attempt to do so, Garth begins to act strange, seemingly tired from working so much, and he also becomes irritable at Howard's suggestions as such. Allowing Howard to prepare the serum himself, Garth continues acting weird, appearing to feel pain in the back of his neck, and when he wipes his gloves with a towel, he suddenly rolls it up and attacks Howard, strangling him. In this moment of mindless, homicidal fury, he also attacks and kills Otto, the shifty inmate who works as a janitor, when he wanders into the lab, getting injured in the process. As a result, when the scene is discovered by the guards, it's believed that Otto was the attacker, as Garth himself completely loses his memory of what happened.
Not too long afterward, Garth is given an official pardon and sent home with his beloved daughter, Martha, although he proves to not be the same man she once knew, as he's now restless, irritable, and reclusive towards both her and Paul Ames. He finds himself still unable to remember what happened in the laboratory and is now unsure if Otto was the one who killed Howard, as they seem to think. One night, he has three of his elderly friends over and try to convince them that they're withering away, particularly using pianist Victor Sondini's playing as an example, telling him that he doesn't play nearly as well as he used to. He then offers to inoculate them with the serum so they can go on living and serving the world with their talents but they refuse due to its dangerous and unpredictable nature, which Garth is none too pleased about and he storms up to his laboratory as they're leaving. After once again becoming irritable at Martha, this time for having called Ames to the house, he decides to call on Sondini at his own home to confront him about what happened earlier. Having accepted the fact that Garth's harsh words about his playing ability are true, Sondini agrees to the inoculation and Garth prepares to do it right then and there, having brought the necessary instruments with him in a small bag. But, during his preparation, he falls prey to the executed killer's blood in his body once again and strangles Sondini. Returning home, it's now clear that Garth knows that he murdered both Howard and Sondini, especially when he tells Captain McGraw that whoever killed the latter must hang for the crime and, that night, he goes to another of his friends, George Wharton, to confess. Telling him that he couldn't bare it if Martha came to hate him for it, he tells Wharton of the murders he's committed and why he did them. He goes on to say that he knows he can't go on living, as it will put more lives in danger, and is also aware that the urge to kill comes over him whenever he tries to inoculate someone. But, before he goes to the authorities, he wants to ensure that his work is passed on and asks Wharton to allow Ames to give him the serum, so he can check the result and ensure that it's alright. But, Wharton refuses and tries to push the button that will bring his servants in, prompting Garth to kill him. With that, and when he attacks Martha in his laboratory, Garth heads straight for the prison he was held in before, demanding to be let in through the gate, when the compulsion overtakes him again and he tries to attack the guard there. He's then fatally shot and admits to the warden that he was going to ask him to hang him before he dies.
Of Garth's three elderly friends, pianist Victor Sondini (Pedro de Cordoba) is the one who takes his telling them that they're old men whose lives are fading fast to heart, as he later reveals to him in private that he knows it's true. Before Garth arrives at his house, we see Sondini practicing at the piano, having trouble playing the piece that everyone complimented on at Garth's house and becoming frustrated with the fact that he can no longer do it the way he once could. After talking with Garth, he ultimately decides to take the serum, as he wanted, but he falls prey to Garth's uncontrollable urge to kill and is strangled. George Wharton (Wright Kramer), who admitted to Garth that he felt he'd lived a full, prosperous life and that it's natural for people to live a certain number of years, suffers a similar fate when Garth shows up at his house in order to confess his crimes to him. As Garth lays it all out, Wharton keeps his hand close to the button where he can call one of his servants for help, and when he's asked to take the serum in one last experiment to ensure that the serum is alright before Garth turns himself in, he refuses and attempts to push the button. The need to kill comes over Garth again and Wharton is then immediately strangled. The third of his friends, Stephen Barclay (Bertram Marburgh), who tells Garth that he's always respected him but has to refuse being inoculated because it's simply asking too much of him, is the only one who escapes his wrath. It's also never made clear exactly what Wharton and Barclay's line of work is and why Garth, aside from their being friends, feels that their lives must be extended for the benefit of the world. He feels that Sondini's music must not die during such a tense time when its beauty is needed, but as for the other two, he merely describes Barclay as someone who can "lead" and "build," while he simply mentions Wharton's decision to retire from "public life" because of his age. If there are any other, more specific hints as to what their individual professions are, they flew right over my head.
Otto Kron (Frank Richards), the convict who acts as the prison's janitor, proves to be the perfect scapegoat for Dr. Ralph Howard's murder, as he was always a shifty, sneaky guy who was often getting into places he wasn't supposed to (Howard admonishes him early on for coming into the laboratory, which he was barred from) and stealing stuff. Ironically, when he does once again wander into the lab, more than likely to steal something, he finds Howard murdered and angrily confronts Garth about it, only to get attacked himself. He does fight back and manages to give Garth a bleeding cut on his head but is ultimately overpowered and killed, with Garth's wound adding as more evidence that Otto was the attacker. Finally, I have to mention Anson, one of the guards, who's tasked with keeping an eye on Garth when he first begins working with Howard in the laboratory. The reason I bring him up is not because he does anything that significant but because he's played by Kenneth MacDonald who, like Dick Curtis and John Tyrell in The Man They Could Not Hang, went on to appear in a good number of Three Stooges shorts, almost always playing really slimy bad guys. At first, I didn't recognize him, as he never gets a close-up and he doesn't have the mustache he always had in those shorts but, when I saw his name in the credits and went back and paid attention to his voice, I knew it was indeed him.
While The Man They Could Not Hang didn't have a production designer or art director listed in the credits and no information about one could be found on any website, which probably meant that all the sets in that film were leftovers from another film, Before I Hang does have an art director credited (Lionel Banks). Although the set of John Garth's prison cell and the area outside it, which you see in one scene when he talks with the warden, looks almost identical to Dr. Savaard's cell in that film and likely was the same set, I'm willing to bet that means that a lot of the sets here are original (the interior of Garth's house itself was later reused in the 1945 film, The Picture of Dorian Gray). And yet, if that's true, it's ironic because, while the sets in The Man They Could Not Hang weren't extravagant or special by any means, they left more of an impression on me than the ones here. Maybe it's because there, you spent a fair amount of time in the big courtroom, saw a little bit more of the prison (as in the actual cells and corridor leading to the gallows; here, all you get is the one aforementioned scene in Garth's cell), and Savaard's booby-trapped house and laboratory, with the interesting equipment in there, was much cooler than the house and lab here, but the sets in this film are just average and serve as nothing more than as stages for the actors to sit and stand in. The courtroom at the beginning, the warden's office, the prison's dimly lit laboratory (which has an interesting prop that depicts the anatomy of a human body, with the heart and the veins being actual passages through which the serum can flow after being injected into it), the interiors of Garth's big, fancy house, his office/laboratory, and the similarly wealthy houses belonging to Victor Sondini and George Wharton all look nice and serve their purpose well enough but they're hardly anything Oscar-worthy.
On the flip side, the cinematography, by Benjamin Kline, who worked before on The Man They Could Not Hang, as well as on The Man With Nine Lives (and who was another person working on the Three Stooges shorts at that time; the ones he shot are among the best-looking of the early ones), is quite atmospheric and moody. The Man They Could Not Hang was shot well and looks quite good, with really crisp black-and-white, especially for a movie filmed in 1939, but there's little about it that's very striking. In Before I Hang, there are a number of scenes, such as those in the prison's laboratory, Victor Sondini's house, and George Wharton's house, that are shot in a very dim manner, with patches of black so stark and deep that the movie could almost be mistaken for a film noir. A really good shot is when Garth appears outside Sondini's door as he's practicing the piano and he's silhouetted in a very menacing manner as he knocks. Finally, there are a lot of shots of Garth wandering the city streets at night after he's committed the murders, and especially when he heads back to the prison and threatens the guard at the gate at the end, that are so darkly lit and thick with fog that it wouldn't be surprising for you to think you were watching one of Universal's atmospheric classics.
Although it's another film that's just barely over an hour long, I don't find it to be quite as entertaining as The Man They Could Not Hang. There are several reasons for that, one of which is that Dr. John Garth, while well played by Boris Karloff, is not as entertaining a character as Dr. Savaard. They're both well-meaning scientists who end up taking lives in their practices and, after they're sentenced to die over the course of their respective films, become the antagonists in one way or another, while still remaining sympathetic, but Savaard's unyielding confidence that his device would have been a success had no one interfered and how his growing disillusionment with humanity as a result causes him to become very dastardly in his methods of taking out his enemies made for a more enjoyable viewing experience. Here, we spend most of the running time watching the more demure and confused Garth become more sinister and wait for him to finally realize what we already know: that the blood of the executed killer in his body has caused him to become homicidal at certain moments.
That's another thing: even for a small-budgeted, B-movie like this, the catalyst for the story is pretty bland and uninspired. Obviously, the people behind the film weren't thinking about being too profound when they developed and filmed it but, regardless, Garth's becoming a more intimidating and uneasy presence and falling into homicidal rages now and then because the serum he took was made from the blood of an executed murderer is just... lame. What also sucks is that there was some potential to delve into it a little more, like in Garth's mannerisms when he begins to lose himself to the urge to kill: he acts as though he's beginning to feel pain in the back of his neck, as he reaches back there and grasps it, he rubs his hands compulsively, and he completely snaps and lashes out whenever he finds himself handling a handkerchief, a towel, or something that he can twist around and use to strangle someone, which is how he kills three of his victims (it also appears to happen when he sees blood as well). Do these actions respectively allude to how the inmate was executed by hanging, his wiping his victims' blood off his own hands, and his modus operandi in committing his crimes, all of which have been passed on to Garth? What's more, Garth initially seems to be losing all sense of himself and becomes a mindless killing machine but, near the end of the movie, it appears as though he's becoming more aware of what he's doing but unable to control himself, as in the scenes between him and George Wharton and Martha, so does that suggest that the killer's derangement is beginning to link itself with him in a more direct way? Plenty of material to delve into here, along with the possibility that the killer's demented soul is contained within the blood, but like I said, the filmmakers had no such aspirations, so the end result is very by-the-numbers.
The scenes where Garth commits murder under the influence of the killer's blood involve a lot of buildup, as he slowly succumbs to its effects until he finally lashes out. The first one, which is that of Dr. Ralph Howard, occurs in prison laboratory one night when he prepares to inoculate him with the serum. Garth begins to act sluggish and distracted but insists to Howard that it's nothing when he asks, becoming agitated when he suggests that he's tried from working around the clock for days on end. He draws off some of Howard's blood to mix with the serum (although the lab equipment blocks Howard's arm, you actually see a close-up of the blood filtering down into a test tube) and sucks it up into a syringe, asking Howard to get him some serum containers. When he turns away, Garth grasps at his neck for the first time, clearly confused by the sensation he's feeling there, and tells Howard that he'd best prepare the serum. As he does so, Garth grabs a small towel and uses it to wipe off his gloved hands, when he suddenly twists it around and turns back to face Howard, suddenly having a blank, empty stare on his face. When Howard sees his expression, he realizes what's wrong and tells Garth to go back to his cell, but Garth attacks, strangling him with the knotted towel and forcing him down to the floor. Once he's done the deed, Garth, in an apparent daze and still grasping at his neck, walks over to look at himself in a mirror on the other side of the room, when Otto Kron walks in. Finding Howard dead on the floor, he's confronted by the maniacal Garth and demands to know what's happened. Garth doesn't answer and stops Otto when he tries to leave the room, flinging backwards against some of the equipment on the opposite side. Otto charges at him and the two of them struggle throughout the room, with Otto managing to shove Garth against some equipment on the table, causing him to fall to the floor. He also throws a stool at Garth, giving him a bloody cut on his head, but he gets back up and continues fighting with Otto, managing to overpower and kill him by apparently forcing his neck back until it breaks. Grasping his neck again, Garth appears to come to his senses and, after seeing the aftermath of his and Otto's fight, removes his gloves and stumbles into the hallway, calling for a guard. Anson rushes to his aide and, after he mutters something about Howard being dead, he's left with another guard as Anson investigates.
Much later in the film, when Garth pays Victor Sondini a visit to his home after the meeting with him, George Wharton, and Stephen Barclay at Garth's own home, he's able to convince him to take the serum. Moreover, he insists that they do it right then and there, as Garth has brought over the necessary equipment, as he feels that if they don't do it right then, Wharton and Barclay will talk him out of it. As he explains this, he takes the handkerchief out of his suit's breast pocket and compulsively wipes his hands. When Sondini asks about this, Garth admits he doesn't know why he's doing it, writing it off as a nervous habit from arguing. Sondini then agrees to allow him to do it and Garth prepares, putting on his rubber gloves, when he begins grasping at his neck again and acting strangely again. He draws off some of Sondini's blood to mix the serum, continuing to grasp his neck and compulsively rub his hands, and just when he's about to mix it, he pulls his handkerchief out again and knots it up. With that, he turns to Sondini and slowly approaches him, the pianist realizing what's about to happen too late to get away, as he's immediately strangled. Garth staggers away from him and walks back to his house, where Martha meets him at the top of the stairs. She tells him that Paul Ames was there and waited for him for a long while, to which Garth responds, "I wish he were here now." He then dismisses her offer to call him back over and walks into his office and laboratory. Martha then notices a spot of blood that Garth left on the stair railing as he came up.
George Wharton does attempt to save himself from Garth's wrath but he doesn't have much more success than Sondini. When Garth shows up at his house the next night and confesses to him by the light of the fireplace in his library what he's done and why, George sits and listens, keeping his hand close to the button that he can use to call for help. As he explains, Garth assures Wharton that nothing will happen as long as he keeps ahold of his senses, but he begins to rub his hands, reach for his neck, and pull out his handkerchief, which he stares at, apparently sensing some significance to it. He then asks Wharton to allow Paul Ames to inoculate him with the serum, promising to be another room so he won't be compelled to kill anyone, so he can ensure that it works safely before he turns himself in, a proposition that Wharton refuses. Seeing Garth fiddling and twisting the handkerchief, Wharton slowly reaches for the button, with Garth warning him not to do it. He tells him that he doesn't want to hurt him but the compulsion is too strong and he's on Wharton within an instant, strangling him. Once he's done, Garth comes out of it quicker than he did and, knowing immediately what he's done, leaves the house and heads back home, with one Captain McGraw's men spotting him and phoning the station.
Near the end of the third act, Paul Ames calls Martha, telling her of George Wharton's murder and that he's coming over to get her away from the house. After he hangs up, she goes upstairs into her father's laboratory and confronts him about it. When she tells him that she knows Wharton has been found murdered, Garth tells her that he's assembled the notes and records necessary for Ames to continue his work, telling her that he himself can't continue it. As he tries to explain why, he once again displays the tell-tale signs of the killer instinct coming over him, absentmindedly taking out a handkerchief and knotting it up while he says that he doesn't want to kill. He then looks down and realizes what he's done, with Martha doing the same in horror, and when he approaches her, she lets out a frightened scream and faints to the floor. For a moment, he reaches for her but, looking at his hands, which have no claimed several lives, he decides not to touch her. He then hears the sound of an approaching siren, as Captain McGraw arrives with several officers and another detective accompanying him. They walk through the house's front door and begin searching the place for Garth, while back outside, Ames arrives and enters the house himself, calling for Martha. He meets McGraw at the top of the stairs and he joins his men in heading into the laboratory. They find no sign of Garth but they do find Martha passed out on the floor. As Ames tends to her, McGraw goes back downstairs and uses the phone to put an APB on Garth, which goes out to all the units in the area with instructions to shoot if he resists arrest. Following a montage of the authorities being deployed, Garth is shown walking the foggy streets (the close-up shot of him doing so is the same one used in the opening credits) until he reaches the prison. Heading up to the gate, he demands that the guard there let him and tells him to call the warden. The guard does so and, after hanging up the phone, unlocks the gate. The urge to kill comes over Garth again and when he walks through the gate, he begins approaching the guard in a menacing manner, rubbing his hands and ignoring his warnings to stay away. After several such warnings, the guard has no choice but to shoot Garth, who collapses to the ground right before Warden Thompson and several other guards rush to the scene. The gate guard explains what happened and Garth, with his last strength, tells Thompson he was going to ask him to hang him before he finally dies.
While still not a lot, there's more music here than there was in The Man They Could Not Hang, with actual scenes in the movie being scored rather than just the opening and ending credits for the most part. That said, it's still comprised of stock music, with M.W. Stoloff as the musical director, and it can hardly be called memorable or impactful in any way (although, I can say that some parts of it sound similar to the stock music that Universal began using in their films around this time), but it does serve its purpose, being eerie and building when it needs to be and bombastic and fast-paced for some of the attack sequences, and that's really all that matters.
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