My father, who was born the year that kicked off The Great Depression, grew up during the golden age of radio. Like me, his brain was (and remains to this day) a warehouse of catchphrases, slogans, jingles and one-liners. One of his most common quotations when I was young was “I am The Whistler… and I know many things,” which was the famous (to everyone but me) line from the long-running radio series The Whistler. Luckily for me, the 1970s saw something of a rebirth of interest in old time radio, with episodes of The Shadow, Dick Tracy and programs produced by Orson Welles’ Mercury Players released on long playing records and cassette tapes. I was nuts for that stuff and spent many dark, happy nights of a coddled childhood locked in my bedroom listening to those shows. They made me the overdramatic and deeply weird person that I am today.

I am the Whistler, and I know many things, for I walk by night. I know many strange tales, many secrets hidden in the hearts of men and women who have stepped into the shadows. I know the nameless terrors of which they dare not speak.

The Whistler was produced in Hollywood and ran for 13 years, from 1942 until 1955, with over 600 episodes broadcast live over the air. The conceit was (anticipating the cynical bent of EC Comics) a portrait of a lawbreaker eventually undone by the aggregation of his or her own greed, malice and stupidity, with The Whistler commenting sardonically and urging the malefactor to his or her personal Hell.  I never actually got to hear any episodes back then but that tagline stuck with me; I would use it when someone would ask me, incredulously, how I knew some obscure bit of trivia. Some years later I found out that Hollywood had made several films out of The Whistler but it took me decades to see any of them. I got to sit down with the first of them, The Whistler, recently.

Produced on the Columbia lot, where B pictures were cranked out like tasty sausages, The Whistler was the first film of note from up-and-comer William Castle. Castle is, of course, best remembered as the gimmick-loving, cigar-chomping fearmonger responsible for such shuddery classics as House on Haunted Hill (1959), The Tingler (1959), Homicidal (1961) and Mr. Sardonicus (1961). Back then, the native New Yorker and former bit player was a mere Columbia hireling, pushing 30, with one critical and commercial bomb (the Boston Blackie vehicle Change of a Lifetime) and a Gold Rush adventure (Klondike Kate, which paired Ann Savage and Tom Neal a few years before their infamous two-hander Detour) under his belt.  J. Donald Wilson's logline for The Whistler is simplicity in and of itself: a depressed man, mourning the death of his wife (whom he had failed to save from drowning) hires a hitman to end his misery… and then learns that his wife may in fact still be alive, precipitating a race to stop the killer (hired through an intermediary) from completing his mission.  With The Whistler, Castle felt he would really show Hollywood his mettle. In his 1977 autobiography, Step Right Up, I'm Gonna Scare the Pants Off America!, Castle wrote:

I tried every effect I could dream up to create a mood of terror: low-key lighting, wide-angle lenses to give an eerie feeling and a hand-held camera in many of the important scenes to give a sense of reality to the horror.

To his credit, The Whistler really does have something. Structurally, it’s typical B-unit stuff, running under an hour and confined for the most part to the backlot. But those generic, nameless city streets and storefronts actually add to the atmosphere of mental degeneration, reminding me of the sad paintings of Edward Hopper and the bleak cityscapes of the nascent film noir movement. Castle has a game cast at his disposal, topped by the frog-voiced Richard Dix (whom Castle claimed to have kept off-balance by making him diet and quit smoking prior to shooting) with J. Carrol Naish and Gloria Stuart (of The Old Dark House and Titanic fame) providing able support. Rounding out the call sheet are Byron Foulger (as a flophouse desk clerk), Joan Woodbury (as a dead mobster’s suicidal wife), Don Costello (who died tragically the following year) and Bowery Boy Billy Benedict (as a deaf mute with a penchant for comic books). Otto Forrest provides the voice of The Whistler, who steps into the frame occasionally to comment on the action as a sort of Greek Chorus (or Crypt Keeper, if you will), giving the movie a “meta” feel that helps it break free from the rank and file of cut-rate whodunits.

Cinematographer James S. Brown had shot Columbia’s The Shadow serial starring Victor Jory as well as a number of Ellery Queen and Crime Doctor titles during a prolific decade that ended with his death in 1949. Brown gets good use out of Columbia’s standing side street and waterfront sets, keeping everything suitable shadow-cloaked. (Brown would work wonders on the wonderfully creepy Poverty Row fright flick Strangler of the Swamp a couple of years later.) At times, The Whistler looks like any B-movie of its vintage but Castle’s insistence on hand-held camerawork and creative framing gives the proceedings an invigorating zest, as does a seemingly nonsequitur wild ride (on what looks to be Mulholland Drive) that concludes with an unexpected fatal crash. All that and a classic fake cat scare (later a staple of the "slasher" subgenre of horror movies) add up to a very satisfying 59 minutes in the dark.

To promote the film, Castle dreamed up some choice ballyhoo in the gimmick of having a Richard Dix-look-a-like show up at the Los Angeles theater running The Whistler, where audience plants would faint at the sight of him. Columbia boss Harry Cohn nixed the notion. Nonetheless, The Whistler turned a tidy profit and spawned several sequels, all starring Richard Dix in a variety of roles. For his reward, $100-a-week Columbia employee William Castle was loaned out to the King Brothers at the third rate Monogram Studios for $500 a week. Columbia pocketed the difference, of course.