THE WHIP HAND (1952)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

One online review claims that this is "borderline SF" because it includes an effort to unleash germ warfare upon 1951 America, but to my mind this just means that WHIP is all about the "uncanny" version of SF, in which the strange devices seem at least theoretically possible.

Aside from the bacterial menace, everything else seems like a mundane thriller. Journalist Matt (Elliott Reed) goes to an unexplored area of Wisconsin for some recreational fishing. He suffers a minor injury and drives to the nearest town he can find. To his surprise, he's warned off a section of private property by a surly man with a gun, rather than a friendly Middle American. Matt finds a real town and seeks out a doctor named Keller, and while getting tended he also meets the doctor's pretty sister Janet (Carla Balenda). But while he's recuperating, Matt gets the sense that everyone in town is strangely hostile to him, particularly when they find out he's a reporter. After he asks too many questions, Matt finds himself introduced to the puppet masters behind the hostile town: a nest of Communist spies, led by mad Commie scientist Bucholtz (Otto Waldis). Fortunately, before Matt's captured by the spies, he sends a message that summons an armed force of men to the spies' HQ, and the Communists fail to unleash devastation on complacent America.

WHIP was directed by William (THINGS TO COME) Cameron Menzies, and he makes ample use of closeups to give the film a cramped, noirish feel, even though all of the characters remain simple stick-figure types. A couple of years later, Menzies would further distinguish himself with a better chronicle of paranoia, 1953's INVADERS FROM MARS (which also concludes in part with a cadre of soldiers invading an enemy stronghold). But WHIP was a flop and lost money for producer Howard Hughes.

The film is most famous for Hughes' tinkering with the movie's political underpinnings. WHIP was derived from a book in which leftover Nazis had infiltrated America (though not in Wisconsin), and apparently even Adolf Hitler himself was among them. Though Menzies shot the film with this Nazi menace in mind-- he even has a scene in which Bucholz is attacked by the men on whom he's run experiments-- Hughes insisted on re-shoots to establish that the spies were in fact Communists. Probably even a recrudescent Hitler would not have made much difference, for WHIP was a film with no "name" stars in 1951, though a few years later one player, Raymond Burr, would ascend to national prominence for essaying PERRY MASON. Though WHIP spends a lot of time on Reporter Matt and his relationship with Janet, the mystery centers upon the disclosure of the main puppet-master's identity, and so I tend to think that the villain, the source of the heinous plot, is the main star of the tale.