The Whistler

The Whistler (1944)

Radio's Master of Mystery... Now on the Screen!

A guilt-ridden man blames himself for his wife's death and secretly pays an assassin to kill him. But then he finds out that his wife isn't dead at all. And now the assassin is on his trail, with no way to call off the hit.

Date of release
1944-03-30
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (30)
Runtime
1h 0m
Genres
Thriller, Mystery
Director
William Castle
Collection
The Whistler Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

The Whistler is a 1944 American mystery film noir directed by William Castle and starring Richard Dix, Gloria Stuart and J. Carrol Naish. Based on the radio drama The Whistler, it was the first of Columbia Pictures' eight "Whistler" films starring Richard Dix produced in the 1940s.

Production

William Castle's debut movie Chance of a Lifetime had been poorly received but Harry Cohn decided to give him another chance and assigned the director to The Whistler. Castle had not liked the script for Lifetime but loved The Whistler script.

Castle wrote in his memoirs "I tried every effect I could dream of to create a mood of terror: low key lighting, wide angle lenses to give an eerie feeling and a handheld camera in many of the important scenes to give a sense of reality to the horror." Castle says he also made Dix give up smoking and go on a diet to make the actor more irritable, and keep him waiting on set and force him to redo scenes in order to increase the sense that he was h…

Cohn liked the movie although he made several suggestions to improve the film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

Recommended