The Devil Commands

Dir. Edward Dmytryk

65 Minutes

USA 1941

Starring: Boris Karloff, Richard Fiske, Amanda Duff, Anna Revere, Cy Schindell, Dorothy Adams

**1/2/*****

Karloff science-fiction/horror picture has its routine pleasures for a film of this nature, though never even approaches the territory suggested by the title. Karloff's Dr. Julian Blair feels like he is close to making a grand discovery regarding human brain wave patterns, but is interrupted after the tragic death of his wife in an auto accident (she was doomed after the fourth compliment from side characters in the span of two minutes) But he becomes reinvigorated when he believes that she is trying to contact him beyond the grave. When he is branded as insane by his peers, he takes off with a charlatan mystic and a mute servant to do experiments in secret, though eventually bodies begin to pile up.

Julian is highly in the wheelhouse of parts Karloff had played at this point: the sympathy scientist who is driven to extremes over his obsessions, but retaining sympathy through his guilt. And he brings a gentle touch to the character, as always being extremely watchable. Attempting to look beyond the surface narrative make be fruitless, but there are some whispers of the overpowering nature of the female: Julian observes that every woman's brain wave is stronger than the male brain waves he has experimented on ("despite them being referred to as the 'weaker sex'"), and the "devil" of the title turns out to be a woman, but this mostly feels like searching for a needle in a haystack to intellectualize much of anything happening here. This is certainly not a higher tier Karloff exercise for this time period, but it is easy to latch onto its enjoyments once realizing that it may not be designed to offer anything more.

October 26th, 2019