One my favorite novels is Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix.  In his book, a store that is obviously a surrogate for Ikea is haunted by the ghosts of guests of the prison that used to occupy the land a century before. Those ghosts then subject unfortunate employees to such tortures as they endured in their rehabilitation back when they were alive.  One of those is “the crank”, which sounds like what it is, though it is serves no purpose, such as grinding flour.  Instead, it is just a weighted handle, grinding down nothing but the will of the person forced to turn it.

I don’t recall seeing that device in a film until I watched 1937’s It’s Never Too Late to Mend, a shockingly nasty little film where we see the crank used to torture various prisoners, including the teenage John Singer.  What we see is like Dickens gone dark, with a boy imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his dying mother subjected to that, as well as being held fast to his cell in an upright position, in something akin to the chest part of a suit of armor.

Jack Livesey plays a fellow prisoner who had tried to intervene before the boy dies, but to no avail.  He is incarcerated for poaching, and so is subjected to the various tortures the squire played by Tod Slaughter relishes in dispensing. 

Slaughter once again plays a downright cartoonish villain, but the material is repellant enough this time to make his hammy performance unpalatable.  His acting is of the school parodied in the Dudley Dooright cartoons, with its mustache-twirling villain, Snidely Whiplash.  It stops being enjoyable camp when the setting is the horror that was prisons of the mid-1800’s in which this is set.

Roughly half of the film takes place in such a facility.  The source material is allegedly a 1856 exposé that led to extensive reforms in UK prisons, leading to, as a statement at the beginning of film puts it, “the high standards we have today.”  I wonder what many guests of her majesty’s prisons at the time of this film’s production thought about that.

The second half of the film is after Livesey has been released from prison.  He tries to stop a marriage between Slaughter and the young Marjorie Taylor, not simply out of spite, but because she has been deceived into the arrangement.  He knows Slaughter was responsible for her beau, Ian Colin, losing his ancestral home.  Colin then spent a year on the high seas, surprisingly making a fortune having discovered gold in Australia.

The transition from one half of this film to the other leaves the viewer feeling they have whiplash.  The prison elements of the film are ludicrously over-the-top, but are gross enough as to make me question the mentality of the person who though of this material.  Then the parts outside of the prison are laughably antiquated, as if this is cheap theatre from before the turn of the century.

It’s Never Too Late to Mend is the fourth Slaughter film I have seen, and the first I have regretted.  All his movies so far have a surprising undercurrent of gruesomeness I wouldn’t have expected from work of this vintage.  But something about this one touched a nerve with me.  More disturbingly, this was the most financially successful of his films.

Dir: David MacDonald

Starring Tod Slaughter, Jack Livesey, Marjorie Taylor, Ian Colin

Watched as part of Powerhouse/Indicator’s blu-ray box set The Criminal Acts of Tod Slaughter: Eight Blood-and-Thunder Entertainments, 1935-1940 Blu-ray