The Man Who Lived Twice (Columbia, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, November 30) I watched a surprisingly good 1936 Columbia “B” movie on Turner Classic Movies called The Man Who Lived Twice – not to be confused with The Man Who Lived Again, the U.S. release title of the excellent British science-fiction thriller The Man Who Changed His Mind, also from 1936. TCM was showing The Man Who Lived Twice as part of a night-long tribute to its star, Ralph Bellamy, who’s quite good in a movie that effectively mixes gangster and sci-fi plot elements. Directed by Harry Lachman – who turned out to have had far more visual imagination than I’d previously given him credit for (I’d assumed that the visual power of the 1935 Dante’s Inferno came from its cinematographer, Rudolph Maté, but working with a less illustrious cameraman, James Van Trees, here Lachman still came up with a surprisingly stunning film visually) from a committee-written script (Tom Van Dycke and Henry Altimus got credit for an original story – and for once the word “original” doesn’t have to be in quotation marks! – and Van Dycke, Arthur Strawn and Fred Niblo, Jr. wrote the actual script), The Man Who Lived Twice is basically Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in reverse. (Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic is actually name-checked in one of the newspaper headlines that chronicles the protagonist’s trial.) Instead of being about a respected doctor who takes a drug that transforms him into a psychopathic monster, The Man Who Lived Twice is about an habitual criminal, “Slick” Rawley (Ralph Bellamy), who’s on the run from the police in general and one cop in particular, Inspector Logan (Willard Robertson), because Rawley shot and killed Logan’s partner in a bank robbery.

He ducks into a medical school where prominent surgeon Dr. Clifford Schuyler (Thurston Hall, giving a surprisingly restrained performance) is lecturing about his theory that certain people become criminals because they have tumors in their brains, and by operating on them he can eliminate their criminal tendencies and make them productive members of society. But he laments that, though he’s done this operation before successfully on dogs and monkeys, the law won’t allow him to operate on a human. “Slick” volunteers to undergo the operation if Dr. Schuyler will also give him plastic surgery to clean up his badly scarred face. Dr. Schuyler is initially reluctant but agrees to do it, and when “Slick” recovers from the operation he literally has no memory of his past life. Dr. Schuyler gives him a new identity, “James Blake,” and tells him the reason he can’t remember anything about his past is he was in a severe auto accident which gave him amnesia. The newly minted James Blake asks Schuyler to give him a home-schooled version of a medical education, and Blake becomes an M.D. who takes a job at a prison hospital. Alas, he’s recognized by two members of his old gang, John “Gloves” Baker (Ward Bond) and his ex-girlfriend Peggy Russell (Isabel Jewell, turning in a marvelously hard-bitten performance). Blake is able to buy off “Gloves” by hiring him as his chauffeur, but Peggy demands $5,000 from him as blackmail and threatens to turn him in to Logan if he doesn’t pay. Meanwhile, Blake has fallen in love with his nurse, Janet Haydon (Marian Marsh, best known as Trilby to John Barrymore’s Svengali), and the two have a decorous Production Code-licit courtship that involves him taking her to symphony concerts and posh nightclubs.

Ultimately James Blake is arrested and put on trial for the murder of Logan’s late partner, and a script that until now has been quite subtly and sensitively written veers off the road into melodrama. “Gloves” Baker and Peggy Russell are subpoenaed by the prosecution to testify against Blake in his trial, but just before he’s scheduled to testify “Gloves” receives a telegram that his mother has just died in Belfast, Northern Ireland. So he offers Peggy a ride and then deliberately crashes his car, killing both of them so they can’t appear as witnesses against Blake. The defense attorney, Henry Treacher (Henry Kolker) – a former judge who was so impressed by Blake’s case he stepped down from the bench to represent him – gives a closing argument essentially telling the jury that James Blake shouldn’t be held responsible for “Slick” Rawley’s misdeeds and society will benefit more from Blake’s continued freedom than Rawley’s execution. Kolker delivers this speech in a way that suggests he learned how to play an attorney giving an impassioned closing argument from watching Lionel Barrymore do it in the 1931 A Free Soul. Nonetheless, the jury finds Rawley a.k.a. Blake guilty, though eventually the state governor pardons him at the urging of the American Medical Association. Despite its over-the-top ending, The Man Who Lived Twice is an excellent movie, one of the minor gems I’ve discovered over the years I’ve been watching TCM, with Ralph Bellamy showing a surprising range that extended far beyond his usual roles losing the film’s heroine (usually to Cary Grant). It’s a well-made movie, effectively and inventively directed by Lachman and with a marvelous tough-gal performance by Isabel Jewell and a quite sympathetic one by Thurston Hall, who for once didn’t have to play a boor.