Mysterious Intruder (Columbia, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie my husband Charles and I finally ended up watching was Mysterious Intruder, the fifth film in the Columbia series based on the radio program The Whistler and, while I wouldn’t exactly call it the best (as one imdb.com commentator did — frankly I still find the first Whistler movie the most haunting plot-wise, and am frustrated that Don Miller’s favorite — The Mark of the Whistler, the second in the series — remains out of circulation), it’s a marvelously honed movie, much more film noir than radio-based suspense thriller. Series regular Richard Dix plays unscrupulous private eye Dick Gale, who like Sam Spade lives on the thin edge of the law (indeed, on the basis of Dix’s performance here he would have made a quite good Spade or Marlowe — maybe not as good as Bogart or Powell but definitely better than Robert or George Montgomery!). He’s hired by an elderly music-shop owner, Edward Stillwell (Paul E. Burns) to find a missing relative named Elora Lund (Pamela Blake) because he has a mysterious object that will make her a fortune. Gale hires an operative of his own, Freda Hanson (Helen Mowery), to pose as Elora to find out just why the old man wants to find her so badly and what on earth he could be holding for her that would be worth a small fortune. The false Elora is in turn stalked by a sinister killer named Harry Pontos (Mike Mazurki, essentially repeating his role from Murder, My Sweet and the first RKO Dick Tracy movie) — when I first heard the character name I thought, “Harry Potter is the murderer?” — and the MacGuffin turns out to be two cylinder recordings of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, who in the real world died in 1887 (one year before the invention of wax-cylinder recording) but in this film’s reality made two cylinders that are estimated to be worth $100,000 each.

Pontos kills Stillwell and abducts the fake Elora, only to release her when it turns out she doesn’t know where the records are ¬— and after an elaborate series of plots and counter-plots, including Freda’s death (by now the corpses are beginning to mount up and, this being a Columbia “B,” the police are suspecting Gale of being the killer), the real Elora Lund turns up, having been in a sanitarium for the previous month recovering from a car accident. Eventually the mastermind of the evil scheme to grab the records turns out to be Freda’s landlord, James Summers (Regis Toomey), and in a final shoot-out Gale kills Summers and then is killed by the police, whom he’s fired at thinking they’re Summers’ henchmen — and of course a bullet pierces the case containing the Jenny Lind records, ruining them. Though the ending is a bit of a cheat ¬— an attempt to shoehorn what’s otherwise a compelling film noir plot into the Whistler formula — the film up until then is quite good, imaginatively scripted by Columbia “B” stalwart Eric Taylor and marvelously directed by William Castle, who seems this time around to have been trying to convince the suits at Columbia that he was an excellent noir director and deserved a chance to make “A”-budget thrillers. Aided by cinematographer Philip Tannura, Castle almost never shoots a scene straight-on from a conventional angle with normal lighting: shot after shot is obliquely angled, lit in half-shadow, rich and detailed in its composition and obviously aimed at showing the Columbia bosses that they had a master director who deserved bigger budgets and stars. The combination of Castle’s visually rich direction and Taylor’s morally ambiguous script (Dick Gale emerges as a nasty character with a noble streak, probably closer to Dashiell Hammett’s version of Sam Spade than the somewhat softer character we know from the 1941 film, who was more of a noble character with a nasty streak) creates a quite compelling little drama that should not only have made Castle an “A” director but also pointed a way for Richard Dix to revitalize his career — as it was, he made just two more Whistler movies (his last was The Thirteenth Hour, also convincingly noir in its plotting and moral ambiguity even though its director was ex-Warners’ “B” stalwart William Clemens, not Castle) and then retired, dying two years later (September 20, 1949 in L.A., of a heart attack, at just 56 years of age). — 2/11/08

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Last night (Friday, February 28) I looked for an online movie on YouTube I could show my husband Charles, who was scheduled to work unusually early today, and I found something called Mysterious Intruder, one of the Whistler series of films produced by Columbia Pictures’ “B” unit in the 1940’s based on a highly popular radio show. The character of The Whistler, who narrated the stories both on radio and film, was supposed to represent the conscience of a criminal, and as with Universal’s contemporaneous Inner Sanctum series, also based on a highly popular radio drama series, each of the films starred the same actor but in different roles. For the Inner Sanctum films it was Lon Chaney, Jr.; for the Whistler movies it was Richard Dix. It didn’t take long for Charles and I to realize we’d both seen Mysterious Intruder before – on February 10, 2008, to be precise, just three months before I started the moviemagg blog – especially once I remembered the MacGuffin. The MacGuffin was two cylinder recordings by the late star opera soprano Jenny Lind, which she made months before her death in 1887 and for which either a private collector or an historical society was willing to pay $100,000 each. Ironically, in Roland Gelatt’s book The Fabulous Phonograph, a history of the recording industry first published in 1955 (and for which Gelatt rather wryly conceded that he’d started his research just in time, catching and interviewing a number of participants in the early history of recording just before they died), he noted that after making a brief splash with his original tin-foil cylinder recorder in 1877, he shelved the invention for another decade to concentrate on the electric light. “But unfortunately voices continued to die during the decade that the phonograph lay dormant,” Gelatt wrote. “Mankind gained the incandescent lamp, but posterity lost Jenny Lind and Franz Liszt.” In Mysterious Intruder, directed by William Castle (showing real promise in his early years as a noir thriller director before he got sidetracked into that weird series of horror movies like The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler, promoted with gimmicks like “Emergo” and “Percepto,” that made his name in the 1950’s and 1960’s) from a script by Eric Taylor, Dix plays private investigator Don Gale. Gale is hired by music-store owner Edward Stillwell (Paul E. Burns) to find his missing niece, fellow immigrant Elora Lund (Pamela Blake).

Sounding a lot like Sam Spade in the early stages of The Maltese Falcon, Gale bluntly tells Stillwell that the $100 he’s offering won’t be of much use to finding a missing person, especially one like Lund who’s been off the radar screen for years. So he hires a friend of his named Freda Hanson (Helen Mowery) to pose as Lund and visit Stillwell claiming to be Lund, so she (and Gale) can find out just why Stillwell is so anxious to find her and why he’s so sure that as soon as she comes to light, Lund will be able to make a lot of money. It turns out Lund’s grandmother ended up with the Jenny Lind records and brought them over to America with her, and they’ve remained in the family ever since. Only the titular “mysterious intruder” shows up; his name is Harry Pontos (though I remember when I saw this movie for the first time, I joked, “So Harry Potter is the killer?”) and he’s played by Mike Mazurki, who was so good as a figure of pathos and pain in Murder, My Sweet and the first RKO Dick Tracy but this time around he’s a lot less interesting because he doesn’t say anything. He just skulks around and ultimately kills Edward Stillwell and steals the breadbox containing the Lind cylinders (though of course we don’t know what they are yet). Freda, whom we assume at first is just an innocent stooge working for Gale, turns out to be a full-blown femme fatale, interested in the records for her own gain. There are two official police officers, detectives Taggart (Barton MacLane, who was in The Maltese Falcon as well in a similar role) and Burns (Charles Lane), who are convinced Gale is up to no good and are determined to bust him for one or more of the murders – since later Freda Hanson is also found murdered in her apartment building, whose manager, James Summers (Regis Toomey), is also after the records. Eventually it turns out that Pontos killed Stillwell, Summers killed Freda, and there’s a shoot-out at the end in which Gale is killed by the cops and the precious records are ruined, smashed to bits by a wayward shot. It’s a nicely atmospheric film, well directed by Castle and photographed by Philip Tannura, and though the YouTube page on which it was posted generated a lot of debate in the comments as to whether Mysterious Intruder is really a film noir, I think it counts. It certainly looks like one, and its unusually corrupt private detective and wanna-be femme fatale steer it towards noir territory and even push it over. The only other 1940’s film I can think of in which a private detective is a villain is the 1949 Manhandled. One thing that amused me this time around about Mysterious Intruder is that, though Mischa Bakaleinkoff got credit for the overall underscoring, and imdb.com lists George Duning as an uncredited composer on the project, the Whistler theme music is credited to Wilbur Hatch – whose best-known credit by far is writing the theme song for I Love Lucy, which inhabits a far different musical world than this film! – 3/1/25