clanciai This should have been an ideal part for Claude Rains, who could have added a great deal of suavity and other nuances to the weird character of William Everest, who as it is raises your suspicion from the beginning, while poor Janis Carter in spite of all her beauty and charm seems to be totally blind to the warnings that should be alarming enough to anyone, like the weird man causing the deaths of three pets - Janis seems to take it for granted that it must be accidents, but three? Just coincidence? Come on.But the story is good, and the intrigue is fascinating. She gets the idea from her cards that a man standing by the bar only has 24 hours left to live, wherefore she will do anything to prevent this and save his life. It actually proves to be at peril, since he just had a car accident and has lost his memory, so the least thing she could do is to help him regain his memory and find out who he is. It proves however that losing his memory was the best thing that could have happened to him, and as he gets it back not even Janis can save him any more.As it is, an interesting intrigue gets undeveloped and lost in superficiality, while a Claude Rains would have been needed to bring the film to maturity.

sol1218 (There are Spoilers) Having a lot of things on his mind William Everest, Richard Dix, stumbles across a well traveled city street and almost gets run down by a speeding car. Hitting his head against a lamp-post Everest completely loses his memory and stumbles into this Greenwich Village night club "The Salt Shaker" to get a drink. It's there where his future is uncannily foretold by Jean Lang, Janis Carter, in a deck of cards that she's playing with: Everest the cards predict has just 24 hours left to live.Leaving both her sister Frankie played by Jeff, a strange first name for a girl, Donnell and her boyfriend Charlie, Loren Tindall, Jane follows Everest outside in order to keep him from his date with death. Not knowing who Everest really is, since he doesn't know himself, Jean calls him "George" and the two try to figure out his true identity. Looking through "George's" pockets Jean comes up with a number of clues that eventually leads to who he really is. The strange clues include a skeleton key and receipts for a bouquet of flowers and birthday cake as well as a doctors perception and railroad schedule and most of all a Canadian dollar bill with a car license plate written on it! Spending most of the evening together tracking down the clues the two soon fall in love with each other and George ends up staying the night with both Jean and Frankie in their apartment. George besides being a real dreamboat, in Jean's eyes, also turns out to be a great cook in his God-given ability in frying perfect sunny-side up eggs as well as him being a perfect gentleman; he also says grace before meals. This has the very suspicious Frankie, who's not as turned on by "Gerorge" as her sister is, to soon fall heads over heels for him as well. There's only one slight imperfection, that goes almost unnoticed by the two women, about this "George" that's very disturbing! Any living thing that he touches, parrakeet's kittens and squirrels, suddenly and mysteriously die!It doesn't take long to realize, with the exception of the love and star-struck Jean, that "Geroge" is bad news to anybody that he comes in contact with and that includes Jean Lang who by then really should have known better. Without giving away any more of "The Power of the Whistler's" storyline Jean's cards did in fact predict "George", or William Everest's fate. ***SPOILER ALERT***It was only too bad that Everest, an escaped and on the loose psycho from a local mental institution, came across so likable and friendly at the beginning of the movie. Knowing who and what he is would have saved a number of our innocent and fellow living creatures, I can't remember Evererst or "George" murdering any human being in the movie, from the horrible fate, by him poisoning the sweet and lovable little critters to death, that he had in store for them.

karlpov Richard Dix plays...well, that's the secret. He gets hit by a car early on in the movie and gets one of those handy Hollywood cases of amnesia. Shortly after being hit, he's asked by a girl in a restaurant to be allowed to tell his fortune for a lark, to show her friends how it's done. The cards come up bad, and then his amnesia comes to light, causing the amateur fortuneteller to more or less adopt him so she can help him find out who he is. You'll notice that folks trust one another in this flick a lot more than they probably ever did in real life. With the results your parents probably warned you about. Dix, as usual, is great as this befuddled but somehow sinister stranger. This is perhaps the best of the Whistler movies. Warning: Implied violence to cuddly animals!

John Seal Columbia's B pictures were generally the worst of the major studios. It's hard to forgive them for those awful Jungle Jim films and producer Sam Katzman generally had no artistic quality in his product. Maybe his absence explains the relative excellence of the Whistler series, in particular this very early entry in the Psycho Killer stakes. More reminiscent of Val Lewton than Katzman, The Power of the Whistler foreshadowed many Hollywood psychological features of the next half century.