Columbia Noir #6: The Whistler (Region B) (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Aug 15, 2024
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
William Castle/Lew Landers/George Sherman/William Clemens/D. Ross LedermanRelease Date(s)
1944-1948 (May 27, 2024)Studio(s)
Columbia Pictures (Indicator/Powerhouse Films)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A
- Overall Grade: A
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region B-locked UK import.]
Indicator’s Region “B” Columbia Film Noir #6 is devoted entirely to Columbia Pictures’ The Whister film series, typically hour-long B-films, of which eight were produced during 1944-48. Based on J. Donald Wilson’s same-named 1942-55 CBS radio series, the pictures are mystery-crime films (with noir and horror elements) all but the last one starring Richard Dix, the former silent era and early talkie star who’d fallen on hard times; an alcoholic, he died of heart trouble just after the film series ended. (At this point in his life, Dix also bore a remarkable resemblance to director David Lean.) Like the Lon Chaney Jr.-starring Inner Sanctum films made by rival Universal, The Whistler films has Dix playing a different character in each picture. And like the floating head within the crystal ball of the Inner Sanctum films, the Whistler himself is not a character within the story but rather serves as a shadowy host/narrator (played by an uncredited Otto Forrest) and Greek Chorus commenting on their plots.
The eight films—The Whistler, The Mark of the Whistler (both 1944), The Power of the Whistler, Voice of the Whistler (1945), Mysterious Intruder, The Secret of the Whistler (1946), The Thirteenth Hour (1947), and The Return of the Whistler (1948)—are compact, often eerie, outrageous fun.
The Whistler, the first of four entries directed by William Castle, stars Dix as industrialist Earl C. Conrad, so wracked with guilt after failing to rescue his wife at sea that through intermediary Lefty Vigran (Don Costello) he puts a contract out... on himself. Lefty arranges to have the assassin (J. Carrol Naish) kill him before the weekend is out, but then Conrad receives a telegram reporting that his wife didn’t drown after all, and instead is being held prisoner in a Japanese POW camp. However, Lefty was shot dead himself moments after hiring Conrad’s hitman and, further, he’s determined to see the job done.
Castle’s later, more famous films, the ones built around wild gimmicks (The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, etc.) are blandly directed, offset mainly by their often outrageous scripts and in-theater gimmicks. His Whistler films, conversely, are outrageous and often imaginatively staged. Indeed, like the best of those later films, Castle’s Whistlers have a delirious fever-dream quality. Unlike his pokey-paced ‘60s films, The Whistler crackles with oddball plot developments coming from several directions at once.
In this case, Joan Woodbury turns up midway through the story as Lefty’s inconsolable widow, who also is determined to commit suicide by driving her car off a cliff, no matter that hapless Conrad is riding along in the passenger seat. Another point of interest is the appearance of pre-Code star Gloria Stuart (The Invisible Man, Titanic) as Conrad’s long-suffering secretary, she also in love with him. Stuart worked steadily in films from 1932-39, then took several years off, only to make just four movies during the 1940s before disappearing again—she was married to columnist and playwright Arthur Sheekman—until 1975 when she began a new phase in the business playing bit parts. Those used to her pre-Code appearances will find it disorienting to see her in ‘40s dresses and hairstyles.
Despite a dramatic drop in pictorial quality (this was up-rezzed from standard-def), The Mark of the Whistler, based on a Cornell Woolrich story, is also quite entertaining. This time Dix plays drifter Lee Selfridge Nugent, who stumbles upon a newspaper ad about a dormant bank account in the name of “Lee Nugent.” He’s knows the money belongs to another man with the same name, but schemes to claim the account for himself, researching the other man’s past before approaching the bank holding the funds.
He manages to fool the bank president, but then becomes the target of brothers Eddie and Perry Donnelly (John Calvert and Matt Willis), the former unrelentingly stalking Nugent as he tries to enjoy his newfound wealth. Meanwhile, Lois Lane-type reporter Patricia Henley (Janis Carter) can’t understand why Nugent doesn’t want his picture taken for the local newspaper, and in desperation Nugent turns to sympathetic peddler Limpy Smith (Paul Guilfoyle) for help. Also appearing here is the wonderful character actor Porter Hall as an unsavory tailor.
One thing that really makes these pictures work is star Richard Dix. Universal’s Inner Sanctum movies are terrible in no small way because of star Lon Chaney, Jr., who lacked the acting chops needed for the varied roles. Dix is not only way more versatile, he also a lot more expressive. Watch him during the scenes at the bank, where at any moment his fraud might be discovered and he arrested. Without dialogue Dix wonderfully expresses his unease, tension, struggling to appear relaxed by making small-talk with the bank guard, etc. If he was indeed an alcoholic it never shows; his performances are remarkably engaged and believable throughout the series.
Pristine video transfer returns for The Power of the Whistler (1945), a change of gears for star Richard Dix and directed this time by Lew Landers (the 1935 The Raven). The film opens in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where Dix’s pedestrian, William Everest, is almost struck down by passing car, hits his head, and apparently develops amnesia. He wanders into a nightclub, drinking at a bar hoping to re-combobulate his thoughts. Nearby, Jean Lang (Janis Carter again) is playing fortune teller with a deck of cards with roommate Frances (Jeff Donnell) and her boyfriend, Charlie Kent (Loren Tindall; Loren & Jeff—talk about gender confusion!). Pointing to Everest, Jean is shocked that, twice in a row, her cards suggest the man will die within the next 24 hours.
Feeling obligated to warn him, she sheepishly approaches Everest, who tells her about his accident and subsequent amnesia. Taking pity on the polite, handsome Everest, Jean becomes determined to stick by his side until his identity is known. There are few clues: in his pockets are only an order for a birthday cake, a cigarette lighter, a doctor’s prescription (missing the patient’s name), a skeleton key, and a Canadian dollar bill with a license plate scribbled on it. Undeterred, Jean invites the man to spend the night, and his good manners impress both Jean and Frances, but Frances, helping Jean out, begins to have suspicions about Everest, and that Jean, already attracted to the man, may be in grave danger.
The film, a reel longer than the first two, serves as another great vehicle for Richard Dix’s strong acting. Here playing a man who might be a homicidal maniac, his work makes a remarkable contrast to his benign character in the first Whistler movie. He’s so clinically unnerving, in fact, one can only wonder what he might have done in, say, Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt; good as Joseph Cotten is in that, Dix might’ve been significantly better.
Though a bit less wild-and-wooly than the Castle entries, its story is admirably highly suspenseful, another solid entry from this B-movie series.
Director (and here, co-writer) William Castle is back for the fourth entry, Voice of the Whistler (1945), also the series’ first real dud. The talky, visually uninteresting film lacks focus and its three main characters are positively schizophrenic. This time Richard Dix plays John Sinclair, a terminally ill millionaire industrialist, introduced via a faux newsreel a la Citizen Kane. Advised to get away from the pressures of work and make new friends, he hides out in the city under the name John Carter, befriends happy-go-lucky taxi driver Ernie Sparrow (Welshman Rhys Williams, adopting an unconvincing Cockney accent), and local nurse Joan Martin (Lynn Merrick). She’s been engaged to clinic doctor Fred Graham (James Cardwell) for four years, but he’s made zero progress career-wise, and she’s refuses to marry a man with no financial security.
With but months to live, Sinclair suggests an unusual arrangement: he marries Joan and she provides companionship for the time he has left, promising her his fortune when he dies. Fred is outraged, but greedy Joan agrees to the terms, and she, Sinclair, and Ernie move into a remote converted former lighthouse. Sinclair is delighted and his health actually improves, which does not sit well with Joan, impatient for her promised millions.
Voice of the Whistler has many problems. The prologue featuring the Whistler pegs Joan, rather than Sinclair, as the focus of this depressing story, even though the body of the script revolves entirely about Sinclair. Joan is introduced as sweet and caring, worrying about Sinclair’s well-being in early scenes, and her frustrations with Fred’s lack of ambition are not without some justification. Yet in the second half of the story she becomes a greedy, complaining shrike: “I kept my part of the bargain…” she cruelly tells Sinclair. Meanwhile, Fred, nice guy at the beginning, shows up at the lighthouse, plotting to murder Sinclair to win Joan back, while the completely sympathetic Sinclair inexplicably plots to murder Fred. Nothing makes sense.
Unlike past entries, Voice of the Whistler is, surprisingly, visually quite dull as well. The lighthouse setting is interesting—Bert I. Gordon used one better for his Tormented (1960)—but the art direction for the former lighthouse’s interiors is downright terrible. The sets are square-shaped rooms like an ordinary suburban home, with no hint at the building’s rounded walls, multiple levels or anything.
The fifth entry, Mysterious Intruder (1946), gets the series back on track. Here, Richard Dix plays private eye Don Gale, approached by elderly music shop proprietor Edward Stillwell (Paul E. Burns) to locate one Elora Lund, who vanished at the age of 14 seven years ago after the death of her mother. Stillwell can only afford to pay Gale $100, but implies finding the missing woman could make him a very rich man. Gale, more Miles Archer than Sam Spade, agrees to look into the matter.
A few days later, Elora Lund (Helen Mowery) comes to Stillwell’s shop, she now a grown woman. Over the moon, Stillwell informs her that her late mother left in his care some personal items to sell, and that among them was something highly valuable, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, heavy drinking thug Harry Pontos (Mike Mazurki) sneaks into the shop, stabs Stillwell, makes off with a package, and apparently kidnaps Elora. However, it quickly becomes apparent that she’s actually Freda Hanson, an impostor accomplice of Gale’s, the dishonest dick trying to obtain the valuable item without actually locating the missing woman.
He traces Pontos to his crummy house, the oversized lout drunk and passed out, but as Gale is poking around looking for the stolen item, Police Detectives Taggart (Barton MacLane) and Burns (Charles Lane) turn up, and in the shootout Pontos is killed and Gale is implicated in his death. Like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Gale plays it cool with the cops while trying to find the priceless whatsit.
Once again Dix impresses with yet another original creation, this time playing exactly the kind of dishonest private eyes the comparatively honest Philip Marlowes of the world are always accused of being by petulant lawmen. As always, it’s fascinating to watch how Dix never slips into a familiar screen persona, not only playing different characters in each Whistler movie, but also playing each one differently—in this case he’s more animated in his movements, exhibiting an oily charm when he thinks a client is going to bring him a big payday, surly with others when he’s down on his luck.
The screenplay, by Eric Taylor, a former pulp writer, has a real Dashiell Hammett-esque flavor, with eccentric characters Mazurki’s drunken thug and especially Rose Deming, a distinguished-looking old lady running a specialty boarding house for people needing a place to hide out. Played by Kathleen Howard, remembered particularly for her comedies opposite W.C. Fields, it’s a disarmingly eccentric characterization. Barton MacLane all but reprises his grouchy Lt. Dundy role from The Maltese Falcon, with ubiquitous Charles Lane more or less essaying the Ward Bond “good cop” from that classic. Lane has a bigger role and more dialogue than most of his feature film appearances, and it’s quite different from the grouchy minor authority types he usually played.
The Secret of the Whistler (1946) is a particularly nasty entry, about average for the series. Ralph Harrison (Richard Dix) is a budding but talentless artist married to sickly Edith (Mary Currier) for her money, she providing him an absurdly lavish studio some distance from their home. While she’s sick in bed, he’s hosting a party people attend merely to eat his food and drink his liquor, and it’s there he meets gold-digger artist’s model Kay (Leslie Brooks). The older Harrison is immediately attracted to the beautiful Kay, but he’s called home when the wife suffers another near-fatal heart attack and given mere weeks to live. As Kay and Harrison impatiently await Edith’s impending demise, a doctor (Arthur Space) provides treatment that reverses her terminal condition, but when Edith decides to surprise Harrison at his studio, she overhears him talking to Kay about how he wishes his wife would hurry up and die.
This entry is fairly good with typically fine acting from Dix, but it’s chockful of unpleasant people: Harrison, Kay, Harrison’s cynical studio neighbors—even Edith’s housekeeper, Laura (Claire Du Brey), though dedicated to Edith’s welfare, is surly and scheming, while hanger-on Joe Conroy (Ray Walker, who gave Jimmy Stewart his suitcase in It’s a Wonderful Life) is a reporter looking for a good story, no matter who gets hurt in the process.
Director George Sherman was heretofore primarily known for his B-Westerns at Republic, yet does a fine job here, with some especially moody tight close-ups of Dix. The script is just okay, offering a twist ending so de-emphasized it’s easy for audiences to miss it entirely.
The Thirteenth Hour (1947) was the seventh of the eight Whistler films, and the last film ever for Richard Dix. Heart problems ended the actor’s career. The film was released in February 1947 and Dix died in September 1948 too young at just 56. The film itself is just okay, a disjointed crime thriller leaving a lot of unexplained loose ends and an outrageous run of bad luck for Dix’s sympathetic but hapless protagonist.
After celebrating roadside café owner Eileen Blair’s (Karen Morley) birthday and engagement to trucking company owner and driver Steve Reynolds (Dix), he grabs his load, picks up a hitchhiker and, moments later, a reckless drunk driver showing off runs them off the road, smack into a gas station. Going from bad to worse, the motorcycle cop on the scene is Don Parker (Regis Toomey), Steve’s rival for single mom Eileen’s affections. By the time he shows up, the hitchhiker has mysteriously vanished (a fact that’s never explained in the film), as have the drunk driver and his girlfriend, who are never found (also never explained). Parker conveniently doubts Steve’s story and has him charged with drunk driving, even though, earlier at the café, he had just one celebratory drink.
Steve’s licensed is revoked, business is bad, and when a driver calls in sick at the last minute, Steve has little choice but to drive an urgent consignment himself. On the road he has more bad luck, engine trouble, and a masked assailant knocks Steve cold, seizes control of the truck, Don the motorcycle cop notices Steve’s truck speeding and pulls him over. The masked assailant then backs the truck over Don and his bike, killing him. Now really in trouble, Steve beats a hasty retreat, his only chance out of this snowballing jam is a glove the assailant left behind, suggesting his attacker is missing a thumb.
The film’s script is certainly busy but absurd. When the dust of the early scenes settles, the film becomes a rather ordinary—but still pretty ridiculous—crime film that first is centered around a stolen car racket but then gives way to a fortune in stolen diamonds. Except for Eileen and her prepubescent son, everyone orbiting Steve’s universe is unpleasant: Don the bitter cop; Jerry Mason (Jim Bannon), Steve’s trucking competitor, who has things turn out, has no reason to be so nasty; Mabel Sands (Bernadene Hayes), the nosy waitress working for Eileen; even Steve loyal pal Charlie (John Kellogg) is not what he seems, which doesn’t make sense, either.
Dix-less, The Return of the Whistler (1948) is nonetheless a solid Whistler entry. Suggested by Cornell Woolrich’s short story All at Once, No Alice, the film stars Michael Duane as Ted, the boyfriend of French emigre Alice (Lenore Aubert, of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein). The film opens with the couple culminating their whirlwind romance with a trip to a Justice of the Peace, but he’s not home and they have car trouble. With no choice but to wait and get married the following morning, they try checking into a hotel but the cranky night clerk (Olin Howland, The Blob) refuses to let the unmarrieds share a room. Steve sleeps in the car but when he returns he finds that Alice has inexplicably disappeared, the night clerk insisting she ran out on him.
Overhearing the altercation among Ted and hotel employees, private eye Gaylord Traynor (Richard Lane) offers his services. On the way back to Ted’s apartment to look for clues, Ted explains that he and Alice met only a short time ago, she fleeing from the abusive relatives of her first husband, an American G.I. who died in France. Upon locating Alice’s marriage certificate to husband #1, Traynor knocks Ted cold and disappears. Ted then locates the large mansion belong to the first husband’s family, only to find the husband, Barkley (James Cardwell) alive and well, claiming Alice is suffering from a mental breakdown and in his care.
Had the Whistler series continued, it’s not certain whether Duane would have continued playing protagonists as Dix had, but he’s a likable actor, up to the task. The plot this time is pretty solid throughout, and busy Richard Lane makes an interesting, shady type with a surprising character arc. To its credit, the series ends on a relatively high note, and out of eight short features, only one is a dud and several rise well above their B-picture status.
The films are generously spread across four Blu-ray discs, two short features per disc, with the 1.37:1 standard, black-and-white films all looking great except for The Mark of the Whistler, which as mentioned above, was up-rezzed from standard definition. All the others, however, are impressively sharp with strong blacks and good contrast. The LPCM mono is also above average and supported by optional English subtitles. Region “B” encoded.
Supplements abound, including new audio commentaries on five of the films, by Josh Nelson on Whistler, Jason A. Ney on Power, the late Lee Gambin on Voice, Jeremy Arnold on Mysterious Intruder, and Eloise Ross on The Thirteenth Hour. The ubiquitous Kim Newman appears in two featurettes, one on the series and the other on the early career of William Castle; there’s a 1958 audio interview with character actor Stuart Holmes; a wealth of image galleries; and two short subjects—It’s Murder (1944), produced by Hugh McCollum and directed by Edward Bernds (the same guys behind many Three Stooges shorts), a kind of loose-lips-sink-ships propaganda short; and It’s Your America (1945), a semi-documentary about returning soldiers directed by John Ford and featuring J. Carroll Naish.
For this review, we received check discs only. The 120-page booklet packaged with the final release includes an essay by Tim Lucas, an extract from William Castle’s autobiography, an article about the radio series, and more.
One of the year’s best boxed sets, Powerhouse makes available a highly-regarded yet heretofore difficult-to-see film series that more than lives up to its reputation. Highly Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV