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Welles is the chief mainstay of inspiration, as befits a junction of cinema and radio. "I... am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night." The Crow's Nest, a waterfront dive and just the place for clandestine meetings, a bereft industrialist (Richard Dix) and "a man whose business is death." He loses his wife at sea and puts a hit on himself, the assassin (J. Carrol Naish) materializes as a punctilious insurance salesman and unwinds at home reading Studies in Necrophobia. (His colleague recommends less morbid pleasures: "Why don't you try raising orchids for a hobby?") The middle man's demise complicates things when the client changes his mind, the killer has a reputation to uphold. "I was paid, I gotta deliver." A sustained paranoid mood, a gratifying hour of gargoyles in tenebrous sets, an early showman's trick by William Castle. The lovelorn secretary (Gloria Stuart), the after-hours telephone repairman, the executioner on flophouse bed 13. "Ever hear the theory that it's impossible for anyone to go into a room without leaving behind some trace of their presence?" Resurrection and expiration in the Japanese prisoner camp, behind the wheel and off the road with the widow (Joan Woodbury). The deaf-mute youth three years ahead of Tourneur's Out of the Past, at the counter with nose buried in a Superman comic-book. Ingenious shoestring effects for days—a vagabond takes the exhausted protagonist to a warehouse and goes for the kill, a shot rings out and the body falls over a candle, the screen goes black. "My psychological experiment is going great!" Lethal fright becomes Castle's central motif, Macabre, House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler... With Alan Dinehart, Robert Emmett Keane, Don Costello, Trevor Bardette, and William Benedict. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |