Watch The Devil's Mask For Free

Very Cool!!!

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

Jack Packard and Doc Long are back—the detectives of I Love a Mystery. Jim Bannon is Packard: serious, cool, businesslike, and tough to fool. Barton Yarborough is Doc—he of the southern drawl, gentle sarcasm, and vaguely comical attitude and behavior. Together they tackle another case, this time attempting to sort out a set of entanglements involving family and colleagues of a missing adventurer.The opening minutes set up the mystery quite well—the characters are introduced and laid out carefully, but it's genuinely tough to tell who is who, who's on which side. Gradually, deliberately, the mystery opens and unravels and eventually builds to a rather exciting climax. The story itself features a shrunken head, the mysterious disappearance of an explorer who may or may not be dead in a jungle somewhere, a collection of his mutually suspicious family members, and a taxidermist who keeps a large black mountain lion in a cage outside his shop.The acting is passable if not great…Bannon and Yarborough are fine if slightly bland, Anita Louise and Michael Duane are tightly wound and thus somewhat unpredictable as the young couple, Mona Barrie is suitably concerned yet perhaps a tad shady as wife and stepmother.The dialog occasionally aims at humor (standing next to a museum case of shrunken heads, Packard suggests that he and Doc put their own heads together, at which Doc winces, "I wish you wouldn't say that"—ha ha) but mostly it's a straight mystery that plays up the spookiness of such elements as said shrunken heads, some poison dart guns, the growling cat, and the general air of suspicion that the family members create around themselves and each other.A tidy little mystery that's tightly plotted and efficiently produced.

***SPOILERS*** It's when a plane crashed on it's way to South America that among the wreckage was found a box with a shrunken human head inside! This set off alarm bells back in San Francisco to who that head belonged to in that the Cordoza Museum where the head supposedly came from had, in it's collection of shrunken heads, one head too many or unaccounted for!The wife of the late big game hunter and explores Clinton Mitchell Louies, Mona Barrie, is terrified of her step daughter Janet, Anita Louise, in that she's planning to have her murdered in that her father who was lost in the Brazilian jungle was in fact murdered by Louise and her secret lover Prof. Arthur Logan, Frnak Wilcox. It was Prof. Logan who was with Anita's father on the expedition and who's love letters to Louise she found hidden in the house. What all this has to do with the head found in the plane wreckage is that it's suspected by Janet to be her father's, Clinton Mitchell, head!The head itself is nothing to write home about in that it can belong to anybody without one but the circumstances of it being found in such a mysterious way had Louise get in touch with ace private eyes Jack Packard & Doc Long, Jim Bannon & Barton Yarborough, in order to protect her from her outargued step daughter Janet, who feels that it's her father's head, from having her killed! In Janet suspecting her of murdering her father and have his head shrunken to cover up her crime!There's also in the movie Janet's good friend Rex Kennedy, Michael Duane, who in trying to get to the bottom of Clinton Mitchell's disappearance ends up being the #1 suspect in Louies' butler Johns, John Elliott, murder when he was spotted snooping around outside the Mitchell mansion. The fact the murder weapon in John's death was a South American native blowgun made it very certain that the unidentified shrunken head must have been that of Clinton Mitchell! Since it was there in South America that he spent the last year getting friendly with the local native head shrinker's who's weapon of choice is the deadly poison dart blowgun! In fact Janet herself was involved with a head shrinker here back in San Francisco Dr.Karger, Ludwig Donath, who was recommended to her by Rex Kennedy a former patient of his. Dr.Karger who was not only shrinking Janet's head but planning to shrink her bank account in using the information about her that he got from his head shrinking sessions to blackmail Janet! ***SPOILERS*** The key to this whole missing or shrunken head mystery turns out to be Janet's good friend and confidant Uncle Leon, Paul E.Burns, the friendly neighborhood taxidermist who among all his stuffed animals that he keeps in his house also has a live full grown black panther named Diablo! It's in fact Uncle Leon who's expertise in stuffing animals as well as shrunken heads that in the end exposed the secret to whom the mysterious head belongs to and even more important who shrunk it!

Devil's Mask, The (1946) * (out of 4) The title might make it sound like a forgotten horror film but it's actually part of Columbia's "I Love a Mystery" series, which was based on the radio show. A plane crashes without anyone getting killed but the strange thing is a shrunken Indian head, which leads two detectives (Jim Bannon, Barton Yarborough) on a strange case that includes a mysterious woman being stalked by a hired killer. I've been watching a lot of these "B" series this year and this one here is by far the worst film I've seen from any of the series. I'm not sure if others are better but I won't be finding out anytime soon. The two leads are downright horrible and their style of comedy is long past funny and I doubt it was very funny back in 1946. The supporting cast is equally dull as is the screenplay and the actual mystery. The ending is actually pretty good but I wouldn't recommend sitting through the rest of the film just to reach it.

A woman thinks her daughter is out to kill her, and hires a detective agency to help her. "Devil's Mask" had a perfectly respectable cast, and a good solid script. With shrunken heads from south America, a panther, and even the use of hypnosis were all probably pretty new and exotic in 1946. (Although, when they try to put someone under hypnosis, they shine a bright light in the actor's eyes, and loudly tap a pencil over and over, so not sure how deeply the actor could have gone under....) The acting by some of the actors is a tad flat, and assistant detective Doc Long (Bart Yarborough) spouts more southern descriptive phrases than necessary, probably the reasons for the low rating on IMDb and membership in the "B Movie" club. The lead detective playing Jack Packard , Jim Bannon, had played detectives and cowboys, and was married to Bea Benaderet (Pearl Bodine, in the Beverly Hillbillies). Another interesting connection, Frank Wilcox, who plays Professor Logan, would also go on to be the oil company president on "Beverly Hillbillies". Also.... Mona Barrie and Bea Benaderet were both in "The First Time". Anita Louise, who plays the daughter Janet in Devil's Mask, was really only six years younger than the Mother Mitchell (Mona Barrie). good Whodunnit. no big glaring plot holes. no big car chase scenes.