The Man Who Changed His Mind, a.k.a. The Man Who Lived Again (Gainborough Pictures, Gaumont-British, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately on Friday, January 17, after the last half-hour of the Sherlock episode “The Reichenbach Fall,” my husband Charles and I watched a marvelous movie from Britain called The Man Who Changed His Mind. At least that’s what it was called in the U.K.; for its American release it was changed to The Man Who Lived Again, which made hash of the clever pun of the British name for the film. It was a 1936 Gaumont-British release by Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Productions (around the same time that they were producing the films that made Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation) and featured Boris Karloff in the first of his mad-scientist roles. Karloff was born in Britain to a family of diplomats – his birth name was William Henry Pratt – and though by the early 1930’s he was well established in the U.S., he still would make occasional trips across the Atlantic to see his relatives and revisit his homeland. On his first such trip in 1933 he made The Ghoul, a quite capable film which largely ripped off The Mummy (he played Egyptologist Professor Morlant, who’s convinced that if he’s buried with a particular red gemstone he will come back to life; alas, the stone is stolen from his coffin, though in the end he comes back anyway because it turns out he was cataleptic and his first burial was by mistake) but offered some interesting thrills of its own. For his second go-round in 1936 he made two mad-scientist films: Juggernaut, which largely sucked; and this one, which was excellent. Karloff plays Dr. Laurience (it’s not clear what his first name is or why his last name is spelled with that extra “i,” especially since everyone in the film pronounces it “Lorenz”), who previously worked on scientific researches in Genoa, Italy and has returned home to his native Britain.

Dr. Laurience has developed a series of typical mad-scientist machines which, he explains, can do a “thought transference” from one body to another. He enlists the aid of his former assistant from Genoa, Dr. Clare Wyatt (Anna Lee, who would cross paths with Karloff again 10 years later in Val Lewton’s last RKO film, Bedlam), to work with him again. There are some great early scenes in which Dr. Wyatt is trying to get the townspeople of the remote British village where Dr. Laurience lives and works to take her to his home – and they don’t want to. Director Robert Stevenson evokes some of the Dracula imagery in having her take a horse-drawn carriage to get there and having the driver let her off well short of the house. Once she arrives, she’s greeted by Laurience’s other assistant, the wheelchair-bound Clayton (Donald Calthrop, whom I’d just seen in Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and I wanted to re-view his other most famous film). Clayton is so bitter about his disability (whatever it is; we’re told he needs regular treatments of some unspecified medication from Laurience to survive) he tells Wyatt, “I wonder which revolts you most – my miserable body or my perverted mind.” Dr. Wyatt has a boyfriend, Dick Haslewood (John Loder), son of British press baron Lord Haslewood (Frank Cellier), who follows Wyatt to Laurience’s place hoping to get a story out of it. He gets considerably more than he intended: Lord Haslewood decides that Laurience is an unheralded scientific genius and he’ll throw the full weight of his media organization behind him. Among the things Lord Haslewood agrees to do for Laurience is give him a fully equipped state-of-the-art lab in which to do his researches – though Clayton warns Laurience that taking Haslewood’s backing will mean selling out.

Alas, Laurience bombs on his first public appearance before an audience of scientists, in which he explains his “thought transference” system and gets laughed at, especially by Professor Holloway (Lyn Harding, a frequent character villain in British films at this time who played Professor Moriarty to Arthur Wontner’s Sherlock Holmes twice). We already know Dr. Laurience’s technology works because we’ve seen him tested on two chimpanzees, one docile and one feral, and it made the feral one docile and vice versa. But the day after the meeting fiasco, Lord Haslewood comes to Dr. Laurience’s lab intent on firing him but keeping rights to his discoveries and his equipment, and Dr. Laurience responds by overpowering Haslewood, rendering him unconscious, and plugging both him and Clayton into the thought-transference machine so Clayton ends up with Haslewood’s consciousness and Haslewood ends up with Clayton’s. Clayton’s already crippled body can’t stand the strain and he dies, but Clayton’s consciousness is now inside Haslewood and he shows up for work at his offices and announces to a shocked group of executives that he will continue to support Dr. Laurience and allow him to continue his researches. Among the more interesting aspects of this film is the impersonation story it becomes as Clayton tries vainly to cover up the gaps in his knowledge of the real Haslewood, and ultimately starts reading a biography of Haslewood to find out more about the man he’s supposed to be. Unfortunately, the whole experience has made Dr. Laurience bitter and determined to use his technology for his own purposes instead of to better humanity, and in a final sequence Dr. Wyatt confronts him as he lures Dick Haslewood to his lab with the intent of doing the thought transference between them, so Laurience will continue to live in young Haslewood’s body and inherit the Haslewood fortune while Dick, in Laurience’s body, will be hanged for Lord Haslewood’s murder.

Fortunately, Dr. Wyatt alerts the police in time and pleads with them to be allowed to reverse the process, so Dick Haslewood gets his consciousness back and Dr. Laurience, realizing in his death throes the evil he’s done with his invention, tells Dr. Wyatt to destroy his equipment and his notes so no one else can duplicate what he’d done. The Man Who Changed His Mind is the first, and in many ways the best, of the run of films in which Boris Karloff plays a scientist who at first genuinely wants to help humanity, but because of social opposition becomes an embittered revenge-driven figure intent only on striking down his real or perceived “enemies.” One critic compared Karloff’s mad-scientist movies with Bela Lugosi’s, in which Lugosi’s writers made him a megalomaniac madman from the get-go, intent on using his discoveries to conquer the world, or at least part of it. The Man Who Changed His Mind also had an interesting trio of writers: while one of them, L. Du Garde Peach, is otherwise unknown to me, the other two are not. Sidney Gilliatt was a British writer and, eventually, director who specialized in light comedy; his best-known credit was co-writing the script (with frequent collaborator Frank Launder) for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938). John L. Balderston had worked with Karloff before on The Mummy (1932) and Karloff’s all-time greatest film, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). I presume it was Gilliatt and/or Balderston who were responsible for the marvelous strain of dry-wit humor that runs throughout this film. Though Karloff would be trotted through these story tropes again and again at Columbia (The Man They Could Not Hang, The Man With Nine Lives, Before I Die, The Devil Commands), Universal (Black Friday), and even Monogram (The Ape), The Man Who Changed His Mind was the first, and I think one of the two best (along with The Devil Commands), of Karloff’s mad-scientist films.