They Can't Hang Me (1955) User Reviews (10)

They Can if They Want

[boblipton · 6/10 · 21 August 2017]

Civil Servant Andre Morrell is to hang for uncivilly strangling a prostitute. He tells "Special Services" Inspector Terence Morgan that he knows the identity of a top spy who is about to smuggle a major secret out of the country, and will trade the information for commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment.

This start leads Morgan on a high-speed investigation that mostly proceeds at a good clip, impeded by a few red herrings, an awful soundtrack, and fiancée Yolanda Donlan, sounding as if she is still decompressing from her lead in the London production of BORN YESTERDAY. Morgan's role is written as the Man Who Gets Things Done, mostly by lying when appropriate. Morrell only has a few scenes, but he's quite good in them, as a man trying to play his last card. The production is cheaply done, but nicely tangled.

Soho Killing: Senior Civil Servant Is Charged.

[hitchcockthelegend · 6/10 · 28 July 2014]

They Can't Hang Me is directed by Val Guest and adapted to screenplay by Guest and Val Valentine from the novel written by Leonard Mosley. It stars Terence Morgan, Yolande Donlan, Andre Morell, Anthony Oliver and Reginald Beckwith.

When Robert Pitt (Morell) is convicted of murder and sentenced to death by execution, he offers the state a bargain. Grant him a reprieve and he will reveal the name of the master spy known as Leonidas before he leaves the country with some atomic secrets.

Thus it's a race against time thriller as the coppers follow the various leads while Pitt grows ever more frantic in his cell. Ideally the police want to find Leonidas without Pitt's help, he is after all a murderer and the state officials are reluctant to grant the requested reprieve. The usual quota of suspects are thrust into the story at regular intervals, giving us a "who is it" thread, while Morgan's head copper tries to keep his lover happy as the search for Leonidas constantly drags him away from planned romantic evenings with her. This is actually a fun thread that's not played for marital drama, as is the byplay between Morgan and Oliver, two intrepid Inspectors who exchange banter and quips even as the pressure mounts.

Enjoyable without ever reaching great heights as a spy thriller, They Can't Hang Me is cautiously recommended to fans of such genre fare. 6/10

Do special branch officers have butler's?

[malcolmgsw · 5/10 · 18 December 2015]

This film would appear to be inspired,if that is the word,by the defection of Burgess and MacLean to the Russians in the 1950s.Terence Morgan plays a special branch officer who has a butler,the inimitable Reginald Beckwith.He also is lumbered by having Yolande Donlan as his girl friend by virtue of the fact that she was married to the director Val Guest.The best part of the film is the opening two minutes,after that it rather drags.To my mind there is a basic flaw.Why would the murderer wait till he was sitting in the condemned cell before trying to make a deal.This makes no sense whatsoever.It is not till near the end that we learn who is the escaping secret agent.However the climax is very disappointing.

Standard whodunnit

[lynchboy2001 · 24 March 2002]

Unable to sleep, I decided to give this film a look, just to see how bad it was, and, although I wasn't pleasantly surprised, at least it wasn't dreadful! It has the typical style of a 50s British patriotic thriller, the effete British accents, the working class accents cliched, the gentlemen villians. What made this film bad was in fact Yolande Donlan, the hero's fiance. Her dreadful overacting with that irritating American accent was enough to make me cringe, and very happy when she left her scenes. Obviously thrown in to appeal to the American audiences of the day, she has the acting ability of a dormouse! I could forgive the gun scenes (no blood, no gunsmoke, just a stationary gun making noise!), but that acting.....

They Can't Hang Me review

[JoeytheBrit · 6/10 · 14 May 2020]

Breezy espionage drama in which Terence Morgan and Anthony Oliver race around London and the Home Counties looking for a master spy. Director Val Guest's wife Yolande Donlan is so teeth-grindingly chirpy as Morgan's redundant love interest that you can't blame him for spending all his time at work, while Andre Morell is terrific as a civil servant trying to bargain away the noose from around his neck by revealing the spy's identity. Still not sure who phoned the police in the opening scene, though...

They Can't Hang Me

[CinemaSerf · 6/10 · 14 November 2022]

André Morell is "Pitt" - in jail awaiting hanging for murdering a prostitute. At the last minute he contacts "Insp. Brown" (Terence Morgan) with information about master spy "Leonidas" who is about to take a top scientific secret behind the iron curtain - in return for his life! Together with his sidekick Anthony Oliver ("Insp. Newcombe") they set off to thwart this plan. It's a decent enough story that moves along a-pace. Yolande Donlan adds a bit of light relief as the fiancée who spends much of her time waiting around for her detective boyfriend and there are just enough red herrings to keep this intriguing, if a bit lightweight thriller, going for 75 minutes.

No idea what is going on here.

[johnshephard-83682 · 1/10 · 26 November 2019]

Forgettable, humdrum cheapie which, although I only saw it a few hours go, is already quite difficult to summarise coherently. Brown of special branch (Terence Morgan) must catch an unknown 'master-spy' before they are able to smuggle something incredibly vital out of the country. This leads him to a power station where an assortment of brilliant scientists work, one of whom Brown concludes must be the spy. At some point there is a security alert, causing people to rush about in a panic because someone, or something, has left the building. Who? What? Why? I don't know, because it isn't mentioned again, and they carry on looking for the thing that mustn't leave the country. Later, hundreds of police cars chase a car through the countryside, and Brown orders a light aircraft to follow suit, though the cars get there just as quickly. The quarry is caught at a barn, but he's not the villain, he's simply a Polish resistance fighter who hasn't been told that the war is over. But then a soldier appears with a metal suitcase, and tests show that its contents are radioactive. So, is this the thing that mustn't leave the country? I don't know - if it is, why is it being delivered to a harmless Polish freedom fighter? Pass. Anyway, it all ends up back at the power station, with (I think) the same metal suitcase and, when Brown engineers a fake news report, the real master spy, a wizened old boffin of about seventy, panics, and proceeds to outrun the entire police force around the grounds of the plant, before going back inside and shooting himself.

I forgot to mention that Brown, inexplicably, has a manservant, who insists on behaving suspiciously so that a few reels can be wasted on chasing him around, and also an unfeasibly long-suffering girlfriend whose sole purpose is to generate an overdone joke about Brown constantly standing her up on dates (he only comes home once in a while to say that he's got to go out again). To pass the time she cooks the slowest slow-cook pie in history, which, if she has any sense, she has laced with rat poison. Meanwhile, in the background, is Andre Morell, on death row, trying to bargain his way out of being hanged, by refusing to reveal the name of the spy, and by boring his guards to death with endless games of cribbage.

If anyone can explain the plot of this ragbag of events, please do so.

An amiable enough time waster

[Leofwine_draca · 5/10 · 18 May 2017]

THEY CAN'T HANG ME is a stock British crime thriller, low budget but fairly well paced and with a modicum of interest. The arresting opening has an unrecognisable Andre Morell (hidden behind a blond hair do) murdering a woman and sentenced to death, only for him to hint that he knows the secret of a spy plot. Inspector Brown is on the case, determined to get to the bottom of it all before Morell is hanged the next morning.

This film's directed by the reliable Val Guest, who makes the most he can out of the elements available at his disposal. My main source of interest came from the casting of Terence Morgan as the heroic protagonist; Morgan was so often typecast as a baddie (or at the very least a scoundrel) during this decade that it's a delight to see him playing something other, and very good he is too. Reginald Beckwith and Basil Dignam also put in appearances. The story isn't as exciting or suspenseful as it could be, but it's an amiable enough time-waster nonetheless.

Hot pace thriller in a chase of an atomic spy involving issues of life and death

[clanciai · 9/10 · 16 July 2021]

Mr. Pitt is sentenced to death for having strangled a prostitute, but he claims they can't hang him since he is in possession of state secrets concerning the security of the nation and possibly of the world. It's a grand opening of a very hot thriller, and in charge of the investigation with heavy loads of responsibility and under the constantly exacerbated stress of time is inspector Terence Morgan, who admirably succeeds in playing it cool all the way, in spite of gunfights with intents to kill and the threat of death of the key witness. The action is very fast, the dialog is like crossfire all the way, and the plot constantly thickens. Meanwhile, the condemned prisoner is vexed by the police officers and guards who disturb him while he is listening to piano music. The realism is convincing enough, the Poles even speak Polish (which is not translated), and the story is well contrived under the circumstances of the case of Klaus Fuchs (mentioned once) and the extreme most paranoid secrecy around the development of the absurdity of the terror balance.

Average mystery that doesn't deliver on it's potential

[bob the moo · 12 March 2003]

Sentenced to death for murder, a civil servant reveals that he has long been a foreign agent smuggling secrets out of the country. He meets with special branch officer Inspector Brown and offers to reveal the identity of an elusive master spy in return for a reprieve. With five days before Pitt is to be hung, Brown sets out to trace the identity of the spy without having to reprieve Pitt.

I was attracted to this film by the shameless title! "They Can't Hang Me" is the cry of Pitt as he is sentenced to death for murder. This happens within the first two minutes of the film in almost complete silence. It is from this point that our story begins - there is never any doubt that Pitt killed the woman but now he wants to deal. The mystery starts well and has potential but it is never filled as fully as I'd hoped at the start. Instead it goes off the rails and becomes baggy and the climax is a real damp squid. It's a shame because it moved quickly for 30 minutes or so and promised much. It is still worth watching once but it isn't very good.

The acting is reasonable for this type of British film of the period and I did quite enjoy the characters. Morgan's Brown is stern logic on force and his side kick from the murder squad adds plenty of light comic touches. Donlan's presence is a mystery and really contributes to the lack of focus and bagginess at times. I guess she was there for the US audience. The bad guys aren't as dangerous or as threatening as we are led to believe from their "master spy" billing, and don't really stick in the memory.

Overall this is an average mystery film but it could have been much better. The good opening and interesting build up in the first half is really good but the film can't deliver on the tension - it should have cranked up but instead it really lets itself go and gets baggy and loses focus.