Sun 19 Jun 2016
Mystery Movie Review: CALLING DR. DEATH (1943).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[7] Comments
CALLING DR. DEATH. Universal Pictures, 1943. Lon Chaney [Jr.], Patricia Morison, J. Carrol Naish, David Bruce, Ramsay Ames, Fay Helm. Director: Reginald Le Borg.
This is the first in a series of six films based on the very popular 1940s radio program, Inner Sanctum Mystery, all of them starring Lon Chaney, Jr. Unfortunately it’s a perfectly ordinary murder mystery, with none of macabre overtones that I remember of the radio series.
I’m also not sure that Lon Chaney was the right person to cast as the star of all six — not based on his role in this one. Can you see Lon Chaney as a noted neurologist who uses hypnotism as one of ways he helps his patients? I tried and I just couldn’t do it, no matter how nicely he talked, softly and eloquently and dressed up in a suit.
As far as the story is concerned, it turns out that even noted neurologists can have marital problems, and when his errant wife turns up dead, he’s an obvious suspect. His alibi? He has none. What’s worse, he has a total blackout for the time of her death. Although another man, his wife’s lover, is accused of the crime, he is hounded by a dogged police inspector (J. Carrol Naish), who does not believe the official version of the case.
What can Dr. Steele do but find the real murderer himself, aided by his lovely assistant (Patricia Morison)? Don’t forget that Dr. Steele is a master hypnotist. Can he hypnotize himself? Well, of course he can.
The problem is not the relatively hokey plot. It’s the fact the real killer is obvious from reel one onward. No surprise ending for this one, alas. I’ve always been a big fan of the radio series, since I was eight years old, but this first film I found disappointing.
June 19th, 2016 at 11:53 pm
Reginald Le Borg also directed Chaney in THE MUMMY’S GHOST
June 20th, 2016 at 10:35 am
You’re so right, Steve: They telegraph the solution way too early. The chief value of this one is that it manages to generate SOME atmosphere. Naish was a great actor, but here he goes over the top much too often.
June 20th, 2016 at 1:52 pm
The INNER SANCTUM films are worth seeing, but overall follow this model. Even WEIRD WOMAN based on Fritz Leiber’s CONJURE WIFE chickens out on the supernatural element in the end. Unlike the Whistler series of anthology films there are no real standouts among these, just some better than others.
Too bad we weren’t talking about the pulp Dr. Death, that might have been more fun.
The useful thing other than the Chaney name was that he could play the endangered hero, or a man being driven mad and into murder, or a villain equally convincingly. His youth gave him more leeway than Karloff and his American image was a big bonus over Lugosi.
Audiences then were not quite as ingrained with him as a lumbering mentally challenged menace as we are. At that time he had also played the relatively sophisticated Larry Talbot and Dracula as well as his usual parts.
Not a bad film, just not a very good one either, which is true of the entire series.
June 20th, 2016 at 5:39 pm
When I wuzza kid staying up late on Friday night to watch “Chiller Theater” I’d groan every time an “Inner Sanctum” movie came on. They seemed to drag on for hours with nothing happening and NO MONSTERS!
As for Chaney, if you google “woefully miscast” I suspect you’ll find a link to “inner Sanctum Movies.”
June 21st, 2016 at 2:21 pm
And the Simon & Schuster Inner Sanctum Mysteries were the source of the radio series’s name…
WEIRD WOMAN was about as half-assed a film version of CONJURE WIFE as one could possibly concoct, despite Evelyn Ankers being fine in every useful sense. Chaney was a bit at sea, but the script was the villain. I think this one was the other half of the videocassette I had of WW, but I bailed quickly on that one, having sat through the travesty of the Leiber novel’s “adaptation”…
June 21st, 2016 at 2:39 pm
If you expect horror the INNER SANCTUM series will disappoint you even anger you. They are a series of mysteries, better suited to the books published under that aegis than the radio show.
They are mediocre at best. Not quite as bad as their reputation though. I never liked Lon in a leading man role much either, but these were made before he was typecast quite so much.
They are very much B programmer mysteries though with all the faults that implies, and the Leiber adaptation was a real disappointment.
June 21st, 2016 at 3:40 pm
…and the radio series wasn’t afraid of the spavined “Scooby-Do” fake supernatural ending, either. As uneven as Himan Brown’s CBS RADIO MYSTERY THEATER was, his earlier “classic” series was about on par…I’ll take Wyllis Cooper and Robert Arthur every day of the week, instead…