Rent The Power of the Whistler / Voice of the Whistler (1945)
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- Synopsis:
Adapted from a hit radio series, each episode has the Whistler emerge from the shadows to introduce a nightmarish, twisting tale in his own sardonic manner, with the first seven films starring Richard Dix
The Power of the Whistler (1945)
A woman uses a deck of cards to predict death within 24 hours for a stranger sitting at a bar, then tries to help him remember who he is based on items in his pockets.
Voice of the Whistler (1945)The 4th film of the Columbia series based on the CBS radio program, "The Whistler", finds wealthy John Sinclair (Richard Dix), with no health or friends, being advised by his doctor to take a long vacation. Heading for the Great Lakes, he becomes ill in the cab operated by Ernie Sparrow (Rhys Williams) an is taken to a linic where he meets nurse Joan Martin (Lynn Merrick), who is engaged to intern Fred Graham (James Cardwell). Doctors now tell him he has only a few months to live and advise him to go to Maine (where, evidently, it will seem longer). He asks Joan to marry him, promising to leave her his fortune. She, no dummy, accepts but hard-loser Fred doesn't like it even though she says she is doing it for him. After six months of living in a lighthouse with only Joan and Sparrow, whom he has hired as his aide, Sinclaie seemingly regains his health and has really fallen in love with Joan. She tells him she can no longer tolerate the loneliness just as Fred arrives for a visit, and John invites him to stay. In a chess game, John facetiously outlines to Fred how he would murder him if he chose to. Fred, decides to beat him to the punch and enters his bedroom that night and attempts to kill John with a poker. The figure in the bed turns out to be a dummy and John, who has been hiding, clubs Fred to death. He tries to throw the body from the bedroom window but it won't open and, planning to return and force it open later, he carries the body to the rocks and then hits Fred's head with a stone. Returning to the lighthouse, John meets Sparrow and tells him that Fred fell from a window but Sparrow knows all the windows have been nailed shut. And Joan, who saw John carry the body out, has summoned the police. - Actors:
- Richard Dix, Janis Carter, Jeff Donnell, Loren Tindall, Tala Birell, John Abbott, Ernie Adams, Murray Alper, Walter Baldwin, Margia Dean, Edythe Elliott, Otto Forrest, Jack George, Jack Gordon, Frank Hagney, I. Stanford Jolley, Cy Kendall, Kenneth MacDonald, Nina Mae McKinney, Sol Murgi
- Directors:
- Lew Landers, William Castle
- Producers:
- Leonard S. Picker, Rudolph C. Flothow
- Writers:
- Aubrey Wisberg, Wilfrid H. Pettitt, William Castle, Allan Radar
- Genres:
- Classics, Drama, Romance
- BBFC:
- Release Date:
- 27/05/2024
- Run Time:
- 127 minutes
- Languages:
- English LPCM Mono
- Subtitles:
- English Hard of Hearing
- Formats:
- Pal
- Aspect Ratio:
- Full Screen 1.37:1
- Colour:
- B & W
- BLU-RAY Regions:
- B
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Reviews (1) of The Power of the Whistler / Voice of the Whistler
To Another Lighthouse - The Power of the Whistler / Voice of the Whistler review by CH
How many people know the series of films made in the later Forties introduced by a shadowy off-screen man known as the Whistler? Based on a radio series, eight were adapted for film. Each of these, at about an hour, starred Richard Dix except for the last one (he had died). He was not so much a recurring character but somebody more interesting. He played a different character in each, some more sympathetic than others and all of them fascinating.
With the third of these, The Power of the Whistler (1945) he is a man knocked by a car at the side of a city road, an accident which loses him his memory, as becomes evident when he seeks comfort in a nearby bar and, at an adjacent table, he is seen by Janis Carter who predicts from her tarot cards that he will die within twenty-four hours. Nobly, and with only the clue of some items in his pocket, she sets about helping him restore his identity and fend off a fall of the Scythe.
There is something of film nor to this, as there is the series itself, and this instalment takes a sinister turn. Say no more, but equally praise the next one, The Voice of the Whistler, in which a man who has risen Citizen Kane-like to great business power - the opening has a sequence of documentary extracts to this effect - now learns that he is set to die within months.
Fancifully he proposes to his doctor’s nurse so that, come the time, she will inherit his fortune and be able to support that heroic fiancé. This is, so far, something of a Capra construction, along with a cockney driver who is one of those founts of wisdom that can grate. The film has another startling element which finds the temporary couple retreating to a lighthouse for about half the film, a situation complicated by Dix’s apparent recovery and... Say no more. There is no predicting what form each of these eight films will take. Nor to be watched in a binge but a couple now and then makes for high-level entertainment which defies modest aspirations.