This one immediately feels different to the three others we’ve seen so far; for one thing, it’s directed not by Nick Grinde but by Edward Dmytryk, for whom this was an early directorial effort before the Hollywood Ten unpleasantness and his subsequent ratting to HUAC… Also there’s a scene-setting narration that you don’t get in the others, and this one’s adapted from a novel by William Sloane, The Edge of Running Water; this is a book for which I actually have some fondness, and it has, perhaps inevitably, been somewhat bastardised for Hollywood B-movie purposes. And the other difference is that Karloff may not be entirely in charge of the mad science going on here… Dr. Blair is working on gear that will not only record people’s brainwaves, but it turns out it might just be able to communicate with the dead. He attracts the interest and cooperation of a fake spiritualist, played by Anne Revere (talking of the blacklist), who’s kind of the titular devil cos she gets even more interested in the power possibilities of this equipment and really drives Blair to work on it. The problem is, well, talking to the dead somehow requires actually dead people to drive the equipment, and that eventually draws outside attention… I don’t think this is quite as good as Everson says in his book (nor quite as visually threadbare as his pissing and moaning about Dmytryk overusing darkness and shadows might make you think), but it certainly is a good one; great basic idea, amazing pseudoscience (the scene where the housekeeper breaks into the lab and inadvertently sets the equipment off is a damned good one), Karloff is obviously fine and Revere is probably the best secondary performer in this whole series. Plus I think it’s quite bold to actually leave the end a little obscure, rather than explicitly rationalise what happens to Blair at the end; I think trying to actually show whatever he summons forth and what it perhaps does to him would’ve been unwise (and probably beyond Harry Cohn’s famous budgetary tight-fistedness), and suggesting something bleak for the viewer to imagine was a better idea.
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