The Whistler was a voice of fate, baiting the guilty with his smiling malevolence.
---John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford, 1998)
"The Whistler" was a radio program on CBS from 1942 to 1955, always with the title character, representing fate, as omniscient narrator. In the 1940's it also became a series of B films at Columbia, some of them directed by William Castle. On those few chances I had to go to the movies when I was a kid (my father tried to keep his kids away from movies, claiming that perverts hung out at movie theatres but actually considering movies -- or anything that gave one pleasure -- a waste of money.). Castle's films of my childhood -- Zotz(1962), Mr. Sardonicus (1961) -- seldom lived up to their hype but always drew me in hopefully.
Castle's earlier films, such as Mysterious Intruder (a late entry in The Whistler series), were more imaginative than his later ones and overcame some of the limits of the B film, using 61 minutes to pack in a great deal of plot and filmed mostly in medium shot (to avoid the expense of close-ups and to keep the sets limited) by the experienced B film cinematographer Philip Tannua. Mysterious Intruder, like Castle's later films, is severely underpopulated (streets are empty, to save money) but does at least have some good character actors: including Charles Lane, Barton MacLane, Helen Mowery, Pamela Blake and Nina Wade. The "star" was Richard Dix, rough and gruff as a sleazy private eye of dubious morality trying to recover two wax cylinder recordings by Jenny Lind. Because of his own greed Dix ends up dead, with the Lind recordings (worth $200,000 dollars to the collector looking for them) destroyed by the same bullets.
Over 500 episodes of the original radio series, adroitly and intelligently directed by George Allen, are available on the internet.
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