- Director: Reginald LeBorg
- Writers: Edward Dien
- Stars: Lon Chaney Jr., Patricia Morison, J. Carrol Naish
- Runtime: 1 Hour, 3 Minutes
- Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2Rt5llY
Calling Dr. Death (1943)
Synopsis
We start out with a face in a crystal ball. It explains about the “Inner Sanctum” and acts all mysterious and spooky as it leads us into the story. Credits roll.
We start out with Dr. Mark Steele hypnotizing a patient. He makes the girl talk, and she hasn’t spoken in months due to psychological problems. “Nothing is impossible where the mind is concerned,” he explains to her parents. Dr. Steele thinks to himself, in an inner monologue, explaining that he’s fascinated with neurology; his own life is a failure, or at least he believes that.
He goes home to have dinner with his wife, Maria, but she’s a no-show. He calls his nurse, Stella, just to talk. It seems likely he has a bit of a crush on Stella. Finally, at 3 a.m. Stella comes home, dropped off by another man. He wants a divorce, but she won’t agree to it. Is there another way out for him?
The next morning, he and Stella talk, and we see that it’s a bit more than a crush, but neither of them can act on it because of his wife. When he goes home from work on Friday, Maria has left for the weekend, but Steele thinks he knows where she went. He drives like a maniac and eventually wakes up at his desk in the office… on Monday. He doesn’t remember the entire weekend; it’s like a blackout.
Two detectives come to the office to see him. Maria has been killed sometime during the weekend. Stella tells Steele to lie to the detectives that he was with her all weekend; they both immediately suspect that Steele killed his wife during the blackout.
The police take him to identify the body, and he barely recognizes her. She’s been burned with acid. Inspector Gregg immediately suspects that Steele did it. Steele finds a button at the crime scene, and his own coat is missing the same button. Could he have killed his own wife and then blocked it from his own memory? He doesn’t remember anything from the weekend.
The inspector calls, and explains that they’ve captured the murderer. The man, Duval, explains to Steele that he didn’t kill Maria. Inspector Gregg doesn’t really think Duval did it, and he says something creepy that implies the he knew Maria before her death. Mrs. Duval comes and tells him a sob story about her problems with Mr. Duval, all because of Maria. Eventually, Duval is found guilty and sentenced to death. Steele agonizes over the whole thing, and finally decides to hypnotize himself to get the answers he needs.
He does it. He hypnotizes himself, with Stella assisting. Gregg comes in during the hypnosis, but Stella wakes him up before the inspector can do anything. They play back the recording, and Steele says he saw Duval at the lodge, and he left him there. Gregg still doesn’t believe it, and suggests that Stella may be in on it as well. Could Steele’s will to live be strong enough that his subconscious would lie under hypnosis?
A few months pass, and there’s a fire at Steel’s office. Gregg thinks that it looks like a bottle of acid spilled and caused the fire. The fire seems to have been set with a device connected to the phone that spilled the acid when the phone rang. Either Stella or Steele could have called that number. All Steele’s personal records were burnt.
On the night before Duval’s execution, Stella and Steele go out to dinner. They’re both very upset about what’s about to happen. Steele takes Stella back to the office and secretly hypnotizes her.
We see that Stella took money from Dr. Steele then split it with Mr. Duvall. Steele did go to the lodge and fought with Maria, and then Stella went inside and killed her, then burned the body. Later, we see Stella instructing Steele what to say while he was hypnotized and being recorded. Lastly, she set the fire in the office to cover up the cancelled checks that would show she had been stealing the money.
Stella wakes up, and Steele and Gregg are standing there. Gregg arrests her for the murder. She basically admitted to the murder in front of him. Gregg explains that he never really suspected Steele, he was just using him to find the real murderer. Gregg gets a phone call, explaining that there has been another murder across town. There’s no rest for the brilliant inspector.
Commentary
“Inner Sanctum” was a radio mystery and horror show that began airing in 1941. Universal created a six-movie series of similarly-themed movies as a sort of tie-in. This was the first of those six films. This explains the “head in the crystal ball” scene, a sort of stand-in for the usual narrator or host that a radio show would always have.
There’s murder, and acid, and hypnosis, but this really isn’t really much more “horrific” than any given episode of Columbo. There’s a lot of “inner monologue” as Dr. Steele narrates his own thoughts and actions. He seems to think about himself a lot. That kind of drama is fine on a radio program, but it really stands out in a movie.
Inspector Gregg is J. Carroll Naish, and he just oozes with suspicion and creepiness, but turns out to be all right in the end. This almost feels like a pilot episode for a detective series. Lon Chaney finally gets to actually do some acting in this one, and he shows us that he’s really not that great at acting.