One interesting aspect of watching older features like 1946’s The Secret of the Whistler is how some things are regarded as weird enough to be newsworthy then are completely commonplace nowadays.  In this case, it’s Mary Currier buying a tombstone for herself. 

This almost makes news when journalist Ray Walker goes to the funeral home to investigate a different story, that one concerning whoever bought an expensive monument placed in a potter’s field.  Since the proprietor will not divulge any information about that, he does suggest a story on this crazy broad who bought her own memorial.  Apparently, it was a really slow news year.

Walker is intrigued to learn this, as he had met her artist husband (Richard Dix) at a party at his studio the other night.  The wife was not at that shindig, and Dix is called away when her dicky ticker appeared to be about to give way.  That he had been putting the moves on model Leslie Brooks suggests he has been literally breaking his wife’s heart.  That Currier wasn’t at that party is telling.  That Dix’s “artist studio” is basically a bachelor pad is a whole other thing.

To everybody’s surprise, Currier defies all expectations and she gets healthier.  Why, she gets in good enough shape to pay a surprise visit to hubby at his studio, where she overhears him professing his love to Brooks.  She reveals this discovery to Dix in her bedroom back in their gothic mansion of a home.  I have the sneaking suspicion they were sleeping in separate bedrooms, which is never a good sign. 

She throws him out of the house.  While he’s gathering his things, she’s trying to get hold of her lawyer, so as to have her will changed.  She has to leave a message when it turns out he isn’t home.  She will never get a chance to talk to him, or update that will, as Dix kills her by poisoning her medicine.

Overhearing the couple’s conversation is Claire DuBrey, a housekeeper who was very dedicated to Currier and who always disapproved of Dix.  There is something rather off-putting about this character.  There must an institute somewhere that trains women to behave this way in this particular job, a secret Rebecca facility that produces endless copies of Mrs. Danvers.

DuBrey is quite brusque with Brooks when she becomes the new lady of the house.  For reasons I could never figure out, she encourages Dix’s new wife to look for a diary her former mistress kept, as that may have clues Dix was planning to kill her. Brooks will find that journal, and I laughed out loud when we see this is a lush formal print job, with “THE DIARY OF EDITH MARIE HARRISON” in embossed gold letters on the cover.  I was a bit surprised to see actual handwriting inside of it, and not inexplicably professionally typeset pages, given how expensive it must have been to have such a custom book created. 

But what is most baffling about this text is the last page was written by Currier after Brooks has snuck into her room.  She writes how she had pretended to be asleep and believes her husband has put poison in her medicine.  I think the only way this diary entry could have been even more preposterous would be if he had come into her room intending to shoot her, and her transcribing the whole thing: “I think my husband has a gun…YES, it is a gun!  And now he’s aiming it at me…he’s pulling the trigger…the bullet has gone through my heart…finding it hard to write…worried my handwriting might soon not be up to the standards of my wealthy, private education…”

The Shadow of the Whistler is not the best entry of this eight-film series.  Its plot is a bit too thin for even a feature that runs just shy of 70 minutes, and too silly in some moments to be convincing.  Even so, there is a certain enjoyment to watching another of these films, B-movies that were little more than paying gigs for all involved.  I wonder if the actors, on taking these jobs, felt like Brooks when she tells friend Michael Duane she’s being wooed by the wealthy Dix and she’s considering succumbing to those advances.  Duane asks her about her pride and she replies, “You can’t eat pride”.

Dir: George Sherman

Starring Richard Dix, Leslie Brooks, Mary Currier

Watched as part of Powerhouse/Indicator UK’s blu-ray boxed set Columbia Noir #6: The Whistler