The Man They Could Not Hang opens across the U.S. in 1939. The first of three similarly plotted films that teams Karloff and director Nick Grinde at Columbia Pictures (including The Man With Nine Lives and Before I Hang) involving doctors experimenting with re-animating people. The fictional mechanical heart device used in the film might later serve as possible inspiration for a pump used in actual open-heart surgery.
This Day in Halloween: Thriller "The Man They Could Not Hang" -- starring Boris Karloff -- opens across the U.S. in 1939.