Past Misdeeds: The Devil Commands (1941)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Kind-hearted and scatter-brained scientist Dr Julian Blair (Boris Karloff) is in the early stages of a revolutionary invention, a sort of super EEG device he sees as only the first step on the road to mind-reading. Things change for the good doctor when his beloved wife Helen (Shirley Warde) is killed in an automobile accident.

The doctor does not take her death well at all. When he tries to distract himself by puttering about in his laboratory, he accidentally activates his device and is astonished when he realizes that it records Helen's mind-waves (which are just as unique as fingerprints, if you didn't know). Clearly, this means her ghost is hanging around, and if Blair puts his mind to the goal, he should be able to develop a way to speak to the dead! Alas, neither his colleagues nor his daughter Anne (Amanda Duff) believe he is onto anything other than a grief-induced mental breakdown, and even the few men who accept the possibility of communication with the dead give Blair the old "things Man is not meant to know" speech. And these people call themselves scientists!?

The only one who actually believes Blair is lab handyman (I think) Karl (Cy Schindell). Karl, you see, is in communication with the dead himself during weekly séances held by professional medium Blanche Walters (Anne Revere). Blair is rather sceptical regarding the whole medium biz, and when he accompanies Karl on that evening's séance, he soon enough discovers all of Madame Walters's dirty tricks. There's just one thing - an electrical discharge during the séance that isn't part of Walters's act at all convinces Blair that Walters's brain actually is the perfect receptacle for talking to the dead.

The promise of money and possible fame and power in the future is more than enough for Walters to agree to Blair's proposition of a partnership in weird science experiments. Alas - and we're still in the night after Helen's burial here - when Blair attempts to use Karl as an amplifier in the experiment, the poor man gets Lobo-nized.

Walters convinces the doctor that the only way to keep on experimenting and some day contact Helen now is for him and her to pack up Karl and their things and set up science shop somewhere else. Which is exactly what they do.

Two years later, we find Blair, Karl and Walters living in an old dark house in a small town in New England. The local population has learned to fear and hate them for reasons of It's In The Script, so his investigation of a minor series of grave robberies leads the nosy Sheriff (Kenneth MacDonald) to Blair and company, where he will inadvertently start a series of mishaps that will end in catastrophe.

Edward Dmytryk's entry (based on the novel "The Edge of Running Water" by William Sloane I clearly need to read) in Columbia's small series of movies where Boris Karloff plays some kind of mad scientist was a rather frustrating viewing experience for me. The film has so many interesting elements, and so many good ideas which are rather ahead of their time that I found myself nearly infuriated with the little Dmytryk and script writers Robert Hardy Andrews and Milton Gunzburg did with these elements, and with the manifold ways in which they sabotaged their movie. A film that has not a thing to do with the devil, by the way, neither in a literal nor a metaphorical meaning.

However, let's start with the film's good bits (though I can't talk about them without also mentioning the ways Dmytryk and co work against them). First and foremost, there's Karloff's wonderful performance as one of the truly sympathetic mad (or in his case really rather "mildly disturbed") scientists. Like some other of the classic horror actors usually playing madmen and monsters, Karloff - never one of the low effort Christopher Lee school of horror acting in any case - always seemed to relish the possibility to play a nice guy for fifteen minutes or so, and consequently, Blair starts out particularly likeable; his development towards slight insanity seems understandable, and never leaves him less sympathetic. In this regard, it helps that the deaths Blair is partly responsible for are all obvious accidents, even though Blair himself sees things rather differently; his grave robbery is clearly not a nice thing, though.

Of course, the narrative treats Blair as if he were your usual murdering mad scientist, confronting him with the same hokey plot developments every mad scientist has to live through, and in the end punishing him oh so fatefully, even though he hasn't done anything that'd lead to more than a minor jail sentence; it's as if the writers had forgotten to actually put the transgressions Blair is being punished for into the script. It is possible that the script thinks it's punishing Blair for his transgressions against Gawd, but then it would really have been helpful if it had made this clear.

Of course, not thinking things through, and not properly developing enticing hints is all this particular script ever seems to do. Just look at the mere wasted chances here, and despair. It's particularly irksome when you have a film so perfectly set-up for straddling the line between (at the time of the filming even rather cutting edge) science and séance. And yet, The Devil Commands still manages to not explore this obvious avenue even when someone involved in the production (either art director Lionel Banks or "props" persons Franz, Oscar and Paul Dallons) designs them the best electric séance set-up I've ever seen, the sort of lab that so perfectly invents its own SF gothic style that it makes the lack of imagination surrounding it only more depressing.

But hey, the gentlemen behind the camera were too occupied with ripping off the plotting style of a bad Universal movie complete with lynch mob and adding a horribly acted (by the pretty useless Amanda Duff) voice-over narrative to tell us the obvious in an ominous and annoying manner to realize what they had here.


Ironically, if you are able to ignore the script's failure at being more and Dmytryk's repeated wrong-headed directorial choices, The Devil Commands is really not such a bad mock-Universal movie; if this were produced by Monogram, I'd probably even congratulate it for not being horrible and not being too stupid. Alas, I'm not at all able to do the same with The Devil Commands' in its slightly more elevated context, though I'm sure there will be more patient viewers than me among you.