The Power of the Whistler (Larry Darmour Productions, Columbia, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 13) I showed my husband Charles a 65-minute movie on YouTube, The Power of the Whistler, third in the series of eight movies Columbia Pictures and their subcontractor, Larry Darmour Productions, made as “B” movies inspired by the popular CBS radio show of that name. Obviously Columbia was hoping for the same level of success as Universal was getting with a “B” movie series based on Inner Sanctum, since they not only adapted the radio show (more or less), they copied Universal’s strategy of using the same actor in each series entry but having him play a different character every time. Universal’s Inner Sanctum star was Lon Chaney, Jr.; Columbia’s for The Whistler series was Richard Dix. By 1945 Dix was definitely in the “on their way down” department, having fallen from his early-1930’s heights as the star of films with major budgets and production values like 1931’s epic Western Cimarron, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. (It was the only one RKO ever won for a film they produced directly, though they won a second Best Picture by proxy as the distributor of Samuel Goldwyn’s 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives.) Dix had an unusual career trajectory; he broke into films in 1917 after having gone to college to study medicine but ended up in the school’s drama club. Within six years he was appearing in big-budget blockbusters like Cecil B. DeMille’s silent The Ten Commandments (1923). That film paired the Biblical story with a modern-dress portion illustrating the immortal moral truths of the Ten Commandments, and Dix appeared in the modern section as John McTavish, “good” brother to Rod LaRocque’s “bad” brother Dan. (I’ve posted about this: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-ten-commandments-paramount-1923.html.) Dix successfully made the silent-to-sound transition in 1929 with a quite good film of Earl Derr Biggers’s Seven Keys to Baldpate, but by the late 1930’s he was on the downgrade. The Whistler series entries were his last films before he suddenly died in 1949 at age 56 of a heart attack. Just before he started making them he’d been in a quite good “B,” Val Lewton’s and Mark Robson’s The Ghost Ship (1943), but that movie was suppressed for years because RKO lost a plagiarism suit over it to two well-known copyright trolls (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-ghost-ship-rko-1943.html).

The first two Whistler films, The Whistler and The Mark of the Whistler (1944), were both directed by up-and-comer William Castle. For this third one Columbia and Darmour replaced him with ancient “B” hand Lew Landers (t/n Louis Friedlander) and commissioned a script by Aubrey Wisberg that [spoiler alert!] cast Dix as a psychopathic killer instead of the sympathetic roles he’d played in the first two series films. The revelation that Dix is a psychopath is supposed to be a shock to the audience, but it’s been revealed in so much of the literature on this film (including the YouTube post on which Charles and I were watching it) that it’s well known even to people who’ve never seen it. The gimmick of the radio show The Whistler was that the narrator (Bill Forman and Bill Johnstone on radio and Otto Forrest here) was supposed to represent the conscience of a criminal, essentially nagging him as he told the story. The Power of the Whistler begins in the evening in New York City (we know that because the film starts with a stock establishing shot of Times Square, in which William Everest (Richard Dix) is struck by a car and nearly killed. He comes to but has amnesia (amnesia was a frequent plot gimmick in mid-1940’s movie thrillers and I suspect the end of World War II had something to do with that). He walks into a club called The Salt Shaker and meets up with a young couple, Charlie Kent (Loren Tindall) and Francie Lang (a girl named Jeff Donnell, a quite personable actress who was in a number of Columbia “B”’s in the 1940’s). Francie’s sister Jean (Janis Carter, second-billed) does an improvised card reading on Everest and turns up the ace of spades followed by the two of clubs, which is supposed to indicate that he will die within 24 hours. Jean does the card reading again and achieves the same result. Against Francie’s advice, Jean follows Everest out of the club to warn him, and he thinks she’s crazy but ultimately agrees to accompany her on a search for his true identity. They have a number of clues in his pocket, including a drug prescription (which, unlike real-world ones, doesn’t have the patient’s name on it), a receipt for a bouquet of 20 long-stemmed roses, a cigarette lighter with an ornate design, a train schedule with the place name “Woodville” circled on it, and a few other odds and ends.

The two calmly walk into the back seat of a parked car so they’ll have a place to talk in private, and in one of the weirder plot twists to a modern audience, the owner of the car not only doesn’t call the police on them but accepts their explanation and offers them a ride. They ask him to take them to the Civic Theatre where the woman Everest (or whoever) sent the roses to, Constantina Ivaneska (Tala Birell), is performing as a star ballerina. They crash her dressing room and her maid, Flotilda (Nina Mae McKinney, the “bad girl” in King Vidor’s all-Black movie Hallelujah in 1929), tells them to wait for her as soon as she comes off stage. Alas, Constantina denies that she ever knew Everest, who because she doesn’t know his real name Jean insists on calling “George.” They also trace the prescription, but learn through a bookstore owner (John Abbott) and a rare book in his stock that the doctor who allegedly wrote it died in 1895, and through a druggist (the marvelous character actor Cy Kendall) that the prescription is for a poison. Jean invites “George” to spend the night at the apartment she shares with Francie, but when the parties wake up they find “George” already up and having made breakfast. Alas, Francie finds her bird has mysteriously died during the night. Later we see “George” alone in a park with a squirrel, whom he’s first feeding out of a bag of nuts and then … we don’t see the altercation, but when Jean joins him later the squirrel is dead and “George”’s hands are bandaged; obviously the squirrel fought back. Ultimately Jean and Francie trace “George” to Woodville, a rural community where the most prominent resident is a retired judge who, unbeknownst to us, originally certified William Everest as crazy and ordered him locked up in a mental institution. William Everest had gone there to kill the judge for revenge, only his plot was temporarily derailed by his amnesia. Thanks to Jean, he’s recovered his full memory (oops!) and he goes out to the judge’s ranch to kill him, but Jean successfully fends him off and at the end she kills him with a farmer’s rake, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of her cards.

The most interesting part of Dix’s performance is the personability with which he plays the psychopath, eerily anticipating by 15 years Anthony Perkins’s performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Like Boris Karloff in The Mummy (1932) and Lionel Atwill in Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Dix gently and even lovingly tries to convince the heroine that by killing her he’s actually doing her a favor, since by taking her out young he's sparing her the fate of growing old and losing her looks. (Dix had also played this game in The Ghost Ship, which contains a scene in which a ship’s junior officer is accusing him of being crazy, but it’s the accuser who’s losing his temper and screaming at the top of his lungs while Dix’s character is staying personable and cool, and even inconveniently points out to his accuser that to any objective observer it would be the accuser who seemed crazy.) It’s also a film that evokes much of the noir look (the cinematographer was L. William O’Connell), including the shots of Venetian-blind shadows over Our Heroine as she sleeps before the day when she will go out with “George” and learn at last who he really is. (Venetian blinds were an all-purpose gimmick for “B” directors seeking a really cheap and easy way to build visual atmosphere; look how often William Nigh, a good candidate for the worst director of all time, used them.) The Power of the Whistler has been called a film noir, which is borderline; Dix’s character is the stuff of noir but everyone else in the movie is too unambiguously nice to qualify as a noir character, and only rarely do we get the chiaroscuro visuals that are also so much a part of the film noir universe.