Who better to play a mad scientist than Boris Karloff? You gotta love those old mad scientists in film. They did not have government grants. They didn't waste tax payer money. They were brainiacs and worried about things like curing death or making human beings super-human. Today we have mad scientists who you pay for. They work in the CDC, NIH, in public health fields, and pharmaceutical companies. They don't try to cure death, they cause it...and get paid a lot to do just that. Our feature today is 1941's "The Devil Commands," directed by Edward Dmytryk.
He's done it! Dr. Julian Blair (Karloff) invites five scientists to see his new discovery. Blair has found a way to read someone's brain...their exact thoughts, and have it all spelled out on a graph. Today mad scientists at pharmaceutical companies invent fraudulent medications for Alzheimer's. I ask you, just who is the mad scientist? Okay, Blair is ecstatic and his beloved wife Helen (Shirley Warde) drives him home from the university. Car crash...she dies. Blair is distraught and reclusive, and when he puts his machine back on, his wife's brain starts messaging him. Now he's obsessed. He wants to communicate with the dead...and he has a lead. Enter medium Mrs. Blanche Winters (Anne Revere). Blair proves her a fraud, kind of. He also proves that she is indeed a medium and her brain can communicate with the dead. Yep, he hooks her up to the thing and guess what...it works.
Leaving a lot out, Anne Blair (Amanda Duff), is worried about her dad. She tries to see him, but he spends all day and night at the lab doing experiments with Mrs. Winters. Winters and him leave town and the university, and get a big house on the Maine coast. There, the townspeople get upset when bodies are robbed from their graves. They assume, correctly, Blair is stealing the corpses but don't know why. In his lab, he has dead people connected to his machine and the medium Mrs. Walters is also connected. Now Anne races to the mansion to find her dad and save him from madness.
Just what does Blair hope to conjure up in his latest experiments? What is Mrs. Winters' deal, and how did she get from fraudster to Blair's assistant? Will the townsfolk storm Blair's mansion with torches and pitchforks? This is a terrific mad scientist film with an eerie ending and an important message to the scientific community of today which is guided by madness and cruelty. See "The Devil Commands," and enjoy a little known Karloff film.
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