It's Never Too Late to Mend

Not surprisingly, this is a very good Tod Slaughter film. Much better than I anticipated. Slaughter does not disappoint - nor does the rest of the cast, directing and story.

Slaughter plays Squire John Meadows, a cruel man that is head of the prison (justice of the peace)and provides plenty of creative punishments for the inmates: straight-jackets, near starvation, whips and more. What's worse he's found a way to try to imprison an innocent man in order to pursue the man's lady friend.

Lovely use of shadows as only B&W films can capture, wonderful cinematography, a cruel story, excellent performances by the cast. This is a worthwhile drama - it's no masterpiece but it is good.

8/10

In It's Never Too Late to Mend, Tod Slaughter plays yet another despicable villain, Squire John Meadows, who doesn't exactly twirl his moustache, but does stroke it quite a bit. The squire has his beady eyes set on pretty Susan Merton (Slaughter's regular co-star Marjorie Taylor), but she is in love with penniless farmer George Fielding (Ian Colin). Not one to give up, the squire tries to have Fielding (wrongly) arrested for poaching, but the farmer's best friend Tom (Jack Livesey), who George once rescued from a frozen lake, owns up to the crime to repay his debt.

Before the squire can come up with another dastardly scheme, George sets sail to Australia to make his fortune, promising Susan that he will return to marry her in two years. While George is away, the squire, who is justice of the peace and runs the local prison with an iron rod, makes life a misery for poor Tom; he also intercepts and destroys letters between George and Susan, and spreads rumours that George has found a wife in Australia. With Susan's father's approval, the wicked man proposes marriage to Susan, but is shocked to learn that George has returned from Oz and is now a wealthy man...

Once again, it is Slaughter's pantomime performance that makes this film so watchable: he is the epitome of slimy Victorian villainy, rubbing his hands with glee and chuckling with laughter as he treats other humans with utter disdain. In the prison, he delights in punishing 15-year-old Matty Josephs, imprisoned for stealing bread to feed his starving mother, and insists on personally lashing inmates with the 'cat'. Those who complain are thrown in 'the hole', a windowless cell where the occupant slowly loses their mind. If he were alive today, Tod would be perfect to play Dick Dastardly in a live-action Wacky Racers.

Based on a book by Charles Reade, which exposed the dreadful conditions in Victorian prisons and prompted reform, It's Never Too Late to Mend is a condemnation of corporal punishment, and a morality play with religious overtones, Tom helped through his darkest hour by the prison chaplain, and the sadistic squire winding up as an inmate in his own hell-hole (you reap what you sow). Ultimately, though, it's another opportunity to witness one of cinema's greatest unsung actors, the wonderfully wicked Tod Slaughter, at his very best.

6.5/10, rounded up to 7 for IMDb.

Never Too Late (1937)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Insane, over the top and sometimes hilarious Tod Slaughter movie. Slaughter plays a psychotic Justice of the Peace who falls in love with a farmer's daughter but she wants nothing to do with him. She's in love with another guy but Slaughter will go to all ends to make sure they don't marry. Slaughter has the nickname "The British Bela Lugosi" due to his over the top performances but I personally find this an insult to Lugosi and American horror films. Lugosi went over the top quite a bit but never in the way Slaughter does, which makes his films watchable but also hurts them. His over the top style kills the melodrama in the film but it helps the campy horror side. The highlight of the film has to be the prison torture stuff because it's just so damn funny due to Slaughter's wildness.

A bit heavy on the sentimentality, and laying on the sadism pretty thick, Tod Slaughter plays the grotesquely inhumane Justice who treats the prisoners of his local gaol as his "naughty children", taking pleasure in exacerbating their misery and humiliation. His nemesis played by Jack Livesey pledges to return the favour in spades having come in for some rough treatment after taking the rap for his friend (Ian Colin) with whom Slaughter is competing for the affections of the nubile Susan (Taylor).

There's some moments of the depravity and malevolence with which Slaughter's characters are synonymous (the rough justice meted out to poor little Matty Josephs is primed to tug at the heart strings), but director MacDonald has avoided the sexual deviancy that is present in the George King pictures. As a consequence, Slaughter's character is brutal and morally corrupt as always, but not so dastardly that he would burn at the stake for his crimes.

Livesey is pretty good as the knock-about farmer, willing to take a bullet for his friend as a square-up for having once saved his life, and Taylor is suitably torn in her chastity for her poor boyfriend abroad, and the apparent munificence and adulation poured over her family by the scheming Slaughter; her facial expressions whenever Slaughter makes veiled sexual undertones are perhaps exactly what you'd expect when a creepy, corpulent walrus-like aristocrat seeks to charm the brassiere of a virgin some thirty years his junior. Solid 66 minute citizen, but nothing remarkable.

This is an underrated portrait of the Victorian prison system and the chaplain who tried to change it. An evil squire(Tod Slaughter) sends an innocent man to the British version of Alcatraz in order to get his filthy mitts on a beautiful girl. The cinematography is what makes this film so memorable. The effective use of light and shadow to accentuate the misery and suffering of the inmates, many of which are victims of a corrupt system, foreshadows a style utilized in many venerable products of English postwar cinema such as David Lean's Oliver Twist(1948) Some modern critics have panned this and many other Tod Slaughter films due to the melodramatic, stagey acting. While films like The Demon Barber of Fleet Street(1936) barely hold up today, Never Too Late is the exception because it is well-acted and photographed and is relevant to the global problem of human rights abuses that in these supposedly progressive times has still to be wiped out. After viewing this, I can see why Queen Victoria passed so many prison reform bills after seeing this story done on stage.