**SPOILERS** Edith Harrison, Mary Currie, has been told by her doctors, getting a second third and even forth opinion, that she doesn't have long to live. Suffering from a weak heart Edith is preparing for the enviable by buying herself an expensive marble monument as her gravestone. Edith has everything engraved on the headstone but her date of death.

While Edith is on the way to the graveyard her partying and carousing husband Ralph, Rchard Dix, the artist is getting very friendly with his latest model blond bombshell Kay Morrell, Leslie Brooks, whom he met at one of his many parties that he's always throwing. Kay herself is anything but interested in the middle-aged, he's 53 and she's 24, Romeo but the fact that he's loaded, with cash as well as booze, makes her overlook that fact.

Told by Ralph that the old lady, Edith, hasn't long to go Key sees the end of the rainbow, with the pot of gold, within her reach and agrees to marry Ralph as soon, after a proper period of mourning, as his wife checks out for good. It's turns out that Edith, in a way, double-crossed Ralph by miraculously getting better where she gets as healthy as she was when she married Ralph some ten years ago.

Out of bed and up on her feet Edith decides to pay Ralph a surprise visit at his studio not realizing that he just about gave her up for dead and is having an affair with his model Kay. Hiding in a room at the studio Edith's expects to surprise Ralph when he shows up but is shocked to see him, as she's hiding behind a screen, show up with Kay telling her that she's,not Edith, his one and only love. Mad as hell Edith decides to cut the cheating Ralph out of her will and puts that in writing in her diary. Later after Edith confronted Ralph, who was shocked to see her back in the pink of health, with the evidence of his infidelity he decides to do the job that her heart failed to do; kill her by spiking her heart medication with poison.

Edith in fact dies, more from a broken heart then anything else, a few days later but Ralph feels that it was the tampered with, on Ralph's part, heart medication that did her in. ****SPOILERS**** Unknowing to Ralph Edith pretended to be fast asleep and saw that heel of a husband of hers Ralph sneak into her bedroom planting the poison and was to later use that evidence, the heart medication, in having him indited in attempting to murder her.

With Edith now gone Ralph and Kay soon tie the knot but things don't go as smoothly as Ralph expected them to go. Ralph is guilt-ridden over Edith's death and feels, reading about a similar murder case in the newspaper, that soon the truth will come out about it in that he poisoned or murdered her. It's when Kay has a long talk with Ralph and the late Edith's maid Laura, Clair De Brey, that she realizes that Edith's death was anything but natural which in fact it was! Finding hidden in the attic both Edith's diary and medication, that Ralph spiked with poison, Kay now feels that he's a wife murderer and if he murdered once he'll surly murder again and she's the wife that he'll murder!

Even though Ralph wasn't a murder he sure as hell acted like one and later his screwed up mind would in fact lead him to commit a murder in order to cover a murder that he didn't commit! The movie shows that even thinking about trying to murder someone and going through the motions will only lead that person to eventually commit murder. Ralph found out only too late that he was in fact home free, to marry Kay and collect his deceased wife's millions, but his guilty conscience took over and in the end drove him mad. Mad to the point of having him do the unthinkable that would in the end lead him straight to the electric chair.

I was eager to see the "Whistler" movies because of William Castle's involvement in some. He was a fine director ion the forties. (He was OK later, too. But in the forties his films were very elegant and subtle. His later horror outings were anything but subtle.) This one is not directed by Castle but it works really well. It was near the end of Richard Dix's run in the series. He was not a great actor, at least not at this point. But he had a very solid presence. And he is plausible as good guys and not so hot ones as well.

Here he plays a less than admirable character. He is a painter. Amazingly, the painting of his that we first see is pretty decent. So often, even in the toniest of A-pictures, paintings by supposedly great artists looked like the work of quick-sketch artists or Sunday painters.

The film opens with a stylishly noirish woman buying her own tombstone. Everything bout this film has the marvelous dark look of a film noir. Or of an Edward Hopper paintings. The scenes look especially like book jackets from the time.

And the female lead looks right off the cover of some true-crime book. Wow, she looks both right and beautiful! And she -- Leslie Brooks -- is a fine actress too. (Intriguingly, she looks like the same studio's biggest star ten years hence: Kim Novak.)

The whole series is entertaining, even the final film, which does not have Dix in it.

One problem I encountered and others may as well: Clearly the movies were based on a radio program of their time. I have never heard that program, though. I get the idea that the Whistler is an omniscient criminologist who either has no bodily image or, like Lamont Cranston of "The Shadow," can make himself invisible.

Guess I will try to track some tapes of the series down. In the meantime, do yourself a favor and search out these films. They're all good. A couple, like this one, are very good.

I always thought Richard Dix was at his best in this series of films. The sense of mystery, menace, or goodness he could generate by turns makes his Whistler films (this was number 6 out of 7) well worth watching, although he could sometimes give the impression of a chunky silent actor getting to grips with talkies.

In this outing he plays a man married to a woman purely for her money and who falls in love with a younger woman who is after him purely for his (her) money. How the situation is nefariously resolved is the plot, simply and carefully plotted. The way the actors spoke their words beginning with capital letters in this - and other entries in the series - makes me think this must have been adapted and expanded from one of the scripts of the 231 radio plays already aired by then. Whether playing a goodie, baddie or bothie Dix exuded a simple yet intense sincerity, he's basically a baddie with all the usual human failings in here and yet you can still find yourself rooting for the poor mutt. Leslie Brooks as the not-too-bad gold-digger artists model was never more alluring, I was definitely rooting for her! There's a poignant twist at the end, so attention is recommended.

Sadly neglected, about time they were all available on DVD, a nice entry in a nice series for those of us who like the genre.