By the time
Boris Karloff appeared as Dr Laurience in 1936's THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND he'd played the mad scientist so many times he could do it in his sleep. That he succeeded in doing it in mine - at least for a few minutes during the middle of the story - is not an indictment of his performance but rather of the creaky and unimaginative screenplay.
Laurience is a formerly brilliant brain specialist whose increasingly radical ideas about the mind and soul have seen him ostracized by the scientific community. "There's something queer about him" as one former colleague so pithily puts it. His only supporter is his former student Clare Wyatt (Anna Lee). A newly qualified doctor she goes to work for him at his crumbling mansion in the English countryside. Her eager boyfriend and cub reporter Dick Haslewood (John Loder) follows her and the article he writes on Laurience attracts the attention of Dick's egotistical millionaire father who sets the scientist up in his own institute.
It's at this point I nodded off.
When I awoke everyone was running around and shortly thereafter the story creaked to it's predictable, implausible ending. There's certainly something charming about the ridiculous collection of junk shop odds and ends that pass for sophisticated scientific equipment capable of transferring the soul from one person to another, but it's not enough on its own to compensate for the lack of energy in everything and everyone else involved in the film.
Karloff churned out so many horror movies in the 30s and 40s that's it's unrealistic to expect every one of them to be a gem. But regardless of the material he's always watchable and that's the saving grace for THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND.
Just make sure you're full of coffee and sitting on a hard chair before you press play on the dvd remote!
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