Le docteur de la mort

Shot on a shoestring budget Calling Dr. Death is not a half bad murder mystery. It has elements of I Wake Up Screaming and it anticipates Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound in its use of hypnotic sequences while a murder suspect is under.

Calling Dr. Death also gives Lon Chaney, Jr. a starring role in a film that's not a horror feature. Chaney plays a neurologist whose wife Ramsay Ames flagrantly steps out on him time and again. But when she winds up murdered it's her married lover David Bruce who winds up in the jackpot. Tried and convicted he's scheduled for execution. Still that doesn't satisfy police inspector J. Carrol Naish who thinks Chaney is the guilty party.

The mark of a good mystery for me is the fact that I did not pick the murderer out early on. In fact one of the strengths of this film is that it shifts your attention from one suspect to another just when you think you figured it out.

Calling Dr. Death is a cheapie from Universal's B picture unit. But it still delivers some fine entertainment.

Lon Chaney Jr. stars as psychiatrist Mark Steele, who is an amiable man with a loyal nurse named Stella(played by Patricia Morison). Unfortunately, he is married to a wild, mean, and unfaithful wife(played by Ramsay Ames) who refuses to divorce him. After a mysterious blackout one weekend, Dr. Steele has no memory, but is told by the police that his wife has been brutally murdered, and the Inspector on the Case(played by J. Carol Naish) doggedly pursues him, convinced of his guilt. The man she was having an affair with is caught, but did he do it, or someone else? Reasonably good film could have dispensed with the head-in-a-crystal ball routine, but acting is good(especially Naish in a role quite similar to later "Columbo"!) Not bad for a low budgeter.

The first of Universal's fun series of thriller films under the Inner Sanctum banner. Each one starred Lon Chaney, Jr. in different roles. In this one, Chaney plays Dr. Mark Steele, a neurosurgeon and expert hypnotist. Steele's unfaithful wife (Ramsay Ames) is found murdered and he's a prime suspect. But Steele has lost his memory of the last few days and can't remember if he killed her or not! So he gets his nurse (Patricia Morison) to hypnotize him so he can try to remember what happened.

Chaney's great in this. I'm sure at the time he welcomed the chance to get out of playing movie monsters. Morison and Ames are lovely to look at and good in their roles. The always-solid J. Carrol Naish plays the hard-nosed police detective investigating the case. Holmes Herbert appears in one of his many butler roles. I really like this series. A little silly at times but it just adds to the entertainment value for me. It has that distinct look and feel Universal movies had at the time. Calling Dr. Death is a very good start to a fun, enjoyable series of mystery thrillers.

In between making his classic monster films for Universal studios, Lon Chaney was given a periodic break of sorts with this series of modest but enjoyable mystery films based on the popular radio program, "The Inner Sanctum". In them, Chaney sported a dapper mustache and wavy hair, and his central characters often were brooding intellectuals who wowed the ladies and regularly found themselves lost in a tangled web of mayhem. CALLING DR. DEATH was the first of these, with Chaney playing a neurologist named Mark Steele who is hugely successful in everything but his own personal life. His unfaithful wife Maria (the ineffective Ramsay Ames, who later stumbled her way through THE MUMMY'S GHOST) tricked him into a worthless marriage where she manipulates him for wealth and prestige, and Steele would like to put an end to the charade, even entertaining the possibility of murdering her to be freed. Chaney is also in love with his dedicated secretary (Patricia Morison), and she comes to his aid one morning when he awakens at his office on a Monday with no memory of where he was or what he had done throughout the weekend, becoming even more bewildered when it is revealed that his controlling wife has been murdered. The chief suspect is the young man Mrs. Steele was having an affair with (David Bruce from THE MAD GHOUL). J. Carrol Naish is very good in this film as the tough Inspector Gregg, and his constant suspicions of Chaney being the killer make for some interesting exchanges between both actors.

None of the six Inner Sanctum thrillers could be called great movies, but they're quick and entertaining in their own right, and fans all have their own varying opinions of which are the best. Though it's not too hard to guess the outcome of CALLING DR. DEATH, I consider it a fine start to the series, and one of the better efforts. **1/2 out of ****

Calling Dr. Death (1943) is the first of six Inner Sanctum films starring Lon Chaney, Jr. The film is a dark mystery-thriller about a neurologist named Dr. Mark Steel and his cheating wife Maria. Maria has a lover which has upset Dr. Steel. Dr. Steel and his nurse Stella Madden has developed a closeness but refrains themselves from a romance. Maria goes away for the weekend but has been found murdered. The police are investigating while Dr. Steel feels he may have murdered his own wife... the question is did he (Dr. Steel) kill her or was it someone else?

A good watch if you like film-noir, mysteries, and the Universal classic horror films.

8/10