Mon 26 Sep 2011
A Movie Review by Dan Stumpf: THE WHIP HAND (1951).
Posted by Steve under Action Adventure movies , Reviews[4] Comments
THE WHIP HAND. RKO Radio Pictures, 1951. Carla Balenda, Elliott Reid, Edgar Barrier, Raymond Burr, Otto Waldis, Michael Steele, Lurene Tuttle, Peter Brocco. Director: William Cameron Menzies.
Amid the general anonymity of reds-under-the beds cold-war movies, The Whip Hand comes as a pleasant surprise: a quirky, paranoid little film from a master of the form, William Cameron Menzies, whose Invaders from Mars (1953) set the standard for quirky paranoia.
Actually Whip wasn’t supposed to be about the Red Menace; it started its weird little life as a movie about finding Hitler holed up in mid-west USA. But when Howard Hughes, then the head of RKO saw it, he said Hitler was last year’s boogie man and they should change the story to something about a Commie plot. Hence this pleasant trifle about sinister Russians infiltrating a small town to do experiments in mass murder.
Given this bifurcated birth, one would expect The Whip Hand to turn out as some godawful mess along the lines of They Saved Hitler’s Brain, but actually it’s a pretty neat job, thanks mainly to the visual intensity imparted to it by Director Menzies, a stylist also responsible for the look of films like Things to Come, Thief of Bagdad and The Black Book.
Menzies at his best has a way of exaggerating the look of ordinary things to evoke a slightly off-kilter feel, a sense that familiar things are somehow alien.
Thus the typical small town into which vacationing reporter Elliott Reid stumbles seems filled from the outset with subtle menace, and the people he encounters always seem to be hiding something just off-screen.
It all culminates in a nifty chase, a mad doctor’s lab, and a rattle of G-Man machine guns, but before we get there we’re treated to Raymond Burr at his nasty best.
Playing a second-string bad guy, Burr offers a patently fake folksy air and a booming hearty laugh at the feeblest of jokes that’s somehow more chilling than anything his boss-heavies put out here. It’s just one more reason to enjoy a movie that should be better known.
September 26th, 2011 at 9:04 pm
Any resemblance of Raymond Burr to Perry Mason in this film is the merest figment of anyone’s imagination.
September 27th, 2011 at 12:12 am
Raymond Burr built up quite a reputation playing villains in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. It was really a surprise when he showed up on TV as the squeaky clean Perry Mason.
September 27th, 2011 at 11:34 am
When I first started collecting noir films on DVD, the first ones I went for were those with Raymond Burr in them, then Marie Windsor, then Lizabeth Scott.
But pre-Mason movies with Burr in them came number one. In the black-and-white noir era, his were the best villains of them all.
(Later on Richard Boone was another who made his mark playing a hero, but man, nobody could match him when he was playing the Bad Guy.)
September 27th, 2011 at 3:34 pm
Burr was a fantastic heavy. His mob boss in HIS KIND OF WOMAN is genuinely scary; a sadistic psychopath with a short fuse. During my youth he was always either Perry Mason or Chief Robert Ironside, so coming across all of his villain roles in recent years has been something of a shock to me.