London Film Festival was great, as was Kevin Smith chatting away at the Indigo 02
London Film Festival was great, as was Kevin Smith chatting away at the Indigo 02
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‘I am The Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. Yes… I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak’
So began every episode of The Whistler radio series that ran for 13 years between 1942-1955. The Whistler never actually appeared in the series but narrated every story and sometimes commented, omnisciently, at the criminals expense. Every episode consisted of some criminal act, normally committed by a regular joe, and how he/she was eventually caught, often caught out by some small thing they forgot about. The series was so popular it only took two years to get to the cinema screens in a series of B-movies.
The series as a whole was a strange one. The Whistler barely appeared, only seen in shadows and heard as a narrator, and the regular star actor, Richard Dix, played a different character in the seven of the eight films made between 1944 and 1948, the eighth had a different lead. A B-movie
series with no real regular character is very unusual, in fact I cannot think of another one. Bringing in Dix as a regular actor was obviously an attempt to counteract this and is must have worked, 8 films in 4 years is pretty good going.
A dingy bar and a nervous man who seems out of place. He is joined by another man who places half a business card on the table. The nervous man places another half of a card and it matches perfectly, their identities are confirmed. The nervous man edges around the point of their meeting but it is soon apparent that he is there to arrange the murder of the owner of a small business. When he changes his mind he finds calling of the killer a lot harder than he imagined… can he do it and save the life he once wanted snuffed out?
The Whistler is a terrific little thriller that really does keep you on the edge of your seat. It is barely an hour long but it takes a simple little story and spins an ever expanding web of problems and twists for our main character Earl Conrad (played, of course, by Richard Dix)
Dix is a good actor, he is certainly very capable in this role and is far above the quality that you normally expect to see in these cheap and quickly made B-movies. Dix plays a man haunted by his decision, a man who is slowly falling apart as he tries to stop the rollercoaster he started.
The performance of Dix is more than enough, on its own, to get me to watch the second film in the series. The fact that the plot is well written and interesting, with a well created sense of tension that slowly builds as the story progresses, and Conrad unravels just adds to my desire to see more.
There is no mystery to The Whistler, much like Columbo you know from the outset what is going on. It is all a matter of how it is going to pan out and whether or not Conrad can come out of the whole affair intact, morally and physically.
The Whistler is a movie that plays to its strengths, using its short running time to keep things moving all the time, gradually uncovering more about Conrad and the hired killer.
The director is, very surprisingly, William Castle. A man who is much better known from what he went on to do. In his later career he made a series of schlock horrors with inventive little tricks that were actually installed in cinemas. He became a much loved master showman who inspired the low grade modern movie company Dark Castle (creators of House on Haunted Hill, Ghost Ship and others). The film ‘Matinee’ starring John Goodman almost certainly has ‘him’ as the main character. Castle is, just as surprisingly, a good director. He certainly knows how to make a good crime thriller. He excels in the use of shadows and in keeping things fairly simple. Every scene is important, again the short running time allows little off plot meandering, and even the seemingly less important scenes are vital to the slow unravelling of Conrad.
I wasn’t expecting that much from this film, The Whistler is not a radio show I am that familiar at all, I am much more interested in the regular character series like Boston Blackie and Johnny Dollar (much like I am with the B-movies of the same era as The Whistler), and I don’t particularly like the style of the show the, one off tales of shock/horror/thrills. I ended up being pleasantly surprised, I like a good mystery that gets me thinking and this sure managed to do that, and along lines that I wouldn’t normally expect, after all trying to stop a hired killer that you yourself have hired is a departure from your average crime thriller.
The Whistler films can be found occasionally on ebay from American sellers for a very cheap price.
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