Fate has a strange way of bringing retribution.
One more from Criterion's coffers: 1958's The Haunted Strangler, which hails from their Monsters and Madmen collection. (Incidentally, two more films from that set have just been added to Hulu, so I expect I'll be checking them out within the coming week.) This one stars Boris Karloff as a mid-19th-century English novelist and mildly squeamish social reformer who sets out to prove that the wrong man was hanged for a series of brutal murders 20 years earlier. His plan hinges on placing the suspicion on someone else -- namely, the doctor who performed the autopsies on all of the Haymarket Strangler's victims and subsequently vanished without a trace -- but the more Karloff digs into the case, the more troubling and personal it becomes.
Director Robert Day, working from a screenplay by Jan Read and John C. Cooper, ladles on the atmosphere, making this a most effective chiller, even if it does come off as a little old-fashioned compared to what Hammer was doing at the time. Take for example the scenes set in the Judas Hole, a music hall where the headliner (Jean Kent) is a singer of mildly suggestive ditties and one of the featured dancers (Vera Day) plays the part of the saucy wench to the hilt. There's also a genteel quality to the performances of Elizabeth Allan (as Karloff's long-suffering wife), Anthony Dawson (as the police superintendent he goes to with his inquiries), Tim Turner (as his eager assistant, who's in love with his daughter), and Diane Aubrey (as his daughter, who's in love with his eager assistant), but Karloff himself is never less than riveting. That's why he's Karloff.