The Devil Commands (1941)

THE DEVIL COMMANDS boasts one of Karloff's best performances ever: he's extremely sympathetic as a doctor driven by Love to reestablish contact with his dead wife. The use of a graph to visualize the brainwaves (so as to differentiate between the brainwaves of various subjects) was a bit of a Master Stroke, if you ask me: it's simple in the extreme and makes clear exactly what's happening when "contact" is made. It's interesting (story-wise AND character-wise) that Karloff's LOVE for his dead wife is used against him- by the duplicitous "Medium"-, which results in his deviation from The Right Path to a career in crime. Not a lot of Fright Films can make such a boast- and not very many actors could pull it off the way Karloff does here. One genuinely feels for his character.

I mostly enjoyed this film. Once there's that willing suspension of disbelief with the science. Karloff goes from a kind and loving man (like he was in "Before I Hang") to a rapt, utterly driven character that believes communicating with his dead wife is worth the lives of any other person, including his daughter. All we ever see are the marks on a graph from some polygraph or electroencephalogram like thing. She is supposedly speaking to him, but what is she saying? What is to do with this date anyway? In the mix is a phony medium who seems to provide some electric connection to his experiments. Even though she is a charlatan, she has properties necessary. It turns out she is the true villain in all of this, driving Boris to despair. She, of course, is in it for the cash and you never forget this. It's another of those ideas that gains momentum and then bogs down. He is obsessed with the death of his wife, but he loses his soul. One weakness is that it's never clear where he hoped to get. The movie would have benefited with a success of some sort.

Though the science involved in what Boris Karloff is trying to do is very flawed, in The Devil Commands Karloff gives a very good performance as a man obsessed with contacting his late wife. Unfortunately he falls into the clutches of a fake medium played by Anne Revere who takes advantage of him.The first few minutes of the film show a happy well adjusted Karloff married to Shirley Warde with daughter Amanda Duff also getting ready to marry scientist Richard Fiske. After a car accident where Warde dies in his arms, Karloff goes off the deep end as he becomes obsessed with the idea that Warde is trying to communicate with him via electrical impulses. His efforts to combine science and the occult lead him to Revere and ultimately to tragedy.The electrical devices in his laboratory have the familiar Frankenstein like look about them, no doubt Edward Dmytryk in one of his early directorial efforts was trying to capture the mood of the Frankenstein films from Universal. Though the rest of the cast is pretty bland, Karloff and Revere play well off each other and carry the film.One exception to the blandness is that of Dorothy Adams whom I recognized immediately as Bessie the maid from Laura. Her part here is similar to that one and her acting has some real bite to it.The Devil Commands is from Columbia's B unit and it's not invested with a lot of production values. Still it's a good horror film from the master himself.

BORIS KARLOFF is a scientist who wants to communicate with the brain waves of his dead wife. His daughter narrates the tale and concludes with: "It is dangerous to communicate with the dead." That's about the impression the viewer gets after seeing what happens in the course of a brisk one hour and six minutes.Columbia produced this low-budget feature and gave the directing chores to Edward Dmytryk, who would later go on to bigger and better things at RKO. But it's an efficient thriller thanks to his direction and the low-key, shadowy photography that makes the absurd story at least come to life on occasion.Enjoyable too are the performances of ANN REVERE as a sinister housekeeper who knows all about Karloff's experiments and what goes on behind the locked doors of his laboratory; DOROTHY ADAMS as an inquisitive servant who agrees to check out the lab and gets locked inside; and KENNETH MacDONALD as the Sheriff determined to find out who is responsible for all the missing bodies from the graveyard.It's typical Karloff stuff and he lends his commanding presence to the role with more dignity than it deserves. If it emerges as a better than average horror vehicle, it's because director Dmytryk is at the helm, but the script is absurd. The low-budget production values are neatly hidden by all the shadowy photography.