Let us now return to the fabled 1960s to discuss the forgotten suspense masterpiece The Devil's Hand, a film that involves neither devils nor hands, but does feature Robert Alda, Neil Hamilton, and a bevy of large voodoo dolls.
A small number of your universe's critics are not persuaded by the quality of The Devil's Hand. For example, reviewer davidtraversa-1 writes, "I don't have the will power or the time to watch this kind of junk." Reviewer Hitchcoc describes the film as "Meandering and dumb." And reviewer Coventry laments "Too bad it eventually didn't turn out to be a very good movie."
Read on for the truth about The Devil's Hand...
The film begins with light-hearted badinage between a young woman (Donna) and her boyfriend (Rick, played by Robert Alda), who is late for their date, forcing her to feed ducks in a park. “You think I should marry a man who’s late for his appointments?” the woman asks the ducks.
“She’s proposing again…” quips the man.
“Only for the seventeenth time,” she admits.
After some more conversation, he tells her he quit his job in the electronics industry. He also admits he hasn’t been sleeping well.
The filmmakers dissolve to the man’s fitful night as he dreams about a different woman dancing in the clouds while wearing a nightgown. Rick gets out of bed and, as all men in the 1960s did when they couldn’t sleep, walks through the city streets while narrating his own predicament. “How could I explain when I myself couldn’t understand it? The dream about a woman, night after night, a woman I’d never met, never seen before. And with each dream, she became more real, more alive, until it seemed that if my hand reached out I could have touched her.” (This is, of course, the film's only narration.)
Mysteriously, he makes his way to a building he’s never been to, where he peers through a window only to see a small statue of a woman.
The next day, Rick brings Donna to the window and explains that the statue is of the woman he’s been dreaming about. Donna says it’s probably just a coincidence, but Rick responds dismissively, “That’s she, all right.”
They enter the shop with the doll and are greeted by Neil “Commissioner Gordon” Hamilton, who addresses Rick by name and tells him he brought a picture to the store, asking Mr. Hamilton to make a doll that looked like the picture. (“Doll” is perhaps too suggestive a word for the crudely sculpted statue.) After a confusing interchange about whether Donna is the same person as the doll, Mr. Hamilton goes to the back of the store and descends a gigantic stone staircase into the store’s basement, which is adorned with fancy rugs, statues, and of course a Satanic altar. At the altar, Mr. Hamilton pokes the doll with a long needle — and outside, Donna bends over, injured by the evil spell.
At night, with Donna sedated in the hospital due to voodoo, Rick falls asleep and sees the dream woman. “Do you find me desirable?” she says from her position in the clouds, taunting him. “Would you kiss me if you could? Would you hold me close?”
Then she tells Rick she is Bianca Milan, and he has her address on the back of a photo, and that he should get the doll and bring it to her.
After nobly telling Donna about the dream and his plan to find the dream woman, Rick drives back to the shop. The doll he thought was Donna was picked up, so Rick takes a box containing a doll of Bianca Milan, for which apparently he has already paid. He takes the boxed doll to Ms. Milan’s apartment and his face shows great shock when he sees the dream woman in front of him.
Of course, Ms. Milan expected him to deliver the doll. She offers him a drink and dinner, served by her Tibetan manservant, who she assures Rick is good at preparing occidental dishes. She also explains about her manservant Ahmet, “He belonged to an ancient cult of worshippers who believe sacrifice brings immortality. His tongue was the sacrifice.”
“The world has many strange religions,” Rick says nonchalantly.
At dinner, Ms. Milan admits she used thought transference to appear in his dreams. “I had to condition you, wear down your resistance, make you want me. So I visited you through mental projection. You may not admit it, but I’m firmly planted in your subconscious.”
“Could be,” he says slyly, “but what’s so special about me to put you through so much trouble?”
“I saw you. I wanted you. That made you special.”
She reveals she has a doll that looks like Rick, which allows her to project mental images better. She even demonstrates her power to him while they are in the same room, for no apparent reason.
“What are you?” he asks.
“Don’t you know?”
“You’re a she-devil. A witch? You’re evil but beautiful. Fascinating.”
She explains she used to be plain until she discovered Gamba. “The devil-god of evil,” she says, perhaps rudely. “I belong to a cult that worships Gamba. You met the high executioner at the doll shop.”
They kiss. She explains he needs to become a member of their cult before they can have sex, so of course she and Rick go directly to her car and to the doll shop. Mr. Hamilton and Ms. Milan lead Rick to the basement, where a ritual is already underway.
During the ceremony, while a young African American woman dances suggestively, Ms. Milan explains to Rick they are going to perform a sacrifice that involves the probability of a person being killed. Their setup is like Russian roulette, with a random set of protrusions — one a deadly knife and the rest harmless — will be lowered onto the person’s heart, possibly impaling him or her. Rick is curious but not at all fearful or alarmed by the sacrifice ritual.
Various cult members dressed in nice business suits bring in the subject, a middle-aged woman. She lies on the altar. Mr. Hamilton uses a pole to spin the knife-wheel on the ceiling. It descends slowly, operated by a series of pedals on the floor. Shockingly, the great devil god Gamba spares the woman, and the blade simply bends as it touches her.
After the potential sacrifice, Rick is initiated into the cult by Mr. Hamilton verbally by asking Rick to keep the cult secret.
Rick and Ms. Milan return immediately to her apartment, and they (presumably) have sex. In the following days, Rick makes prescient investments, crumples up a note from Donna (whom he hasn’t seen), and (presumably) has more sex with Ms. Milan.
One night, Rick is visited by a drunken woman who is also in the cult. She complains to him, “They play with evil like it were some kind of a new toy. They cut all the goodness out of you and you forget what it’s like to be kind. You become a robot, without any will of your own.”
He responds to her thusly: “Shut up.”
After she leaves, Rick, with a touch of guilt, reports her disloyalty to Ms. Milan and Mr. Hamilton, and they reveal he has passed the test — snitching on the drunk woman was merely a test of loyalty, and clearly his “Shut up” was the appropriate response.
Later, Rick finally visits Donna, who is still in the hospital. He tells her that all her pain will go away at midnight tonight. Donna is a bit worried about this, but she doesn’t seem to notice the darker implications of his promise. He leaves her as quickly as he arrived.
Meanwhile, Ms. Milan shares a cigarette with cult leader Neil Hamilton. He tells her, “My dear, you’re an extraordinary woman. But a woman nevertheless.”
At night, Rick, who appears to have some goodness remaining in him, breaks into Mr. Hamilton’s shop, intending to remove the gigantic pin from the Donna doll.
In fact, he cleverly removes the pin but slips its sharp end between the doll’s arm and body, hiding the fact that he has removed it. Mr. Hamilton, however, soon arrives to investigate the cult headquarters, though nothing appears to come of this.
Rick returns to Ms. Milan’s apartment, where he fends off her suggestions that he might be disloyal because he recently visited Donna in the hospital. In order to convince her he is loyal to the cult and in love with Ms. Milan, he jumps on top of her and plies her with eloquent words: “Every waking minute you’re on my mind. Even when I sleep, I can’t shake you.” He adds, “You’re all around me. In the air, in the rain, and in the sunlight. You’re as much me as I am.”
Of course, she has no choice but to accept that he loves her after he tells her she is in the rain, etc.
A few hours later, Mr. Hamilton calls a meeting of the cult and announces that there is a traitor in the room. Cleverly, the filmmakers cut between Rick and another cultist who has been taking pictures and writing notes, and is clearly a traitor as well. Mr. Hamilton announces that the unnamed traitor will be dead at midnight.
In perhaps the film’s shortest and most efficient scene, Rick sits with Ms. Milan at a bar while catchy surf rock music plays. Rick, nervous, says, “Can’t you have Ahmet shut that music off?”
Ms. Milan simply replies, “Darling, it’s so good.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Hamilton uses his voodoo powers to kill the real traitor, a bald man who is driving away from the city, and who Mr. Hamilton forces to crash his car by smugly stabbing the man’s voodoo doll with a pin and then holding it over a fire.
As the film moves to its climax, Rick picks the discharged Donna up from the hospital while Ms. Milan and Mr. Hamilton discover that Donna’s voodoo doll has been tampered with. Rich suggests moving far away from town and Donna agrees, though Rick doesn’t tell her the reason. However, they do not leave immediately, for unclear reasons, giving Ms. Milan a chance to telepathically connect with Donna using her doll.
In the film’s climactic sequence, Mr. Hamilton presides over another sacrifice ritual. The sacrificial subject, shockingly, is Donna herself! Rick is forced to spin the fancy knife-wheel, which descends slowly toward Donna, growing ever closer.
Rick, realizing that the sacrifice is rigged and will kill Donna, simply pulls her off the altar and starts a fire by knocking over a brazier. And also punches Neil Hamilton. Rick carries Donna out of the burning headquarters. They drive away, believing all the cultists to be dead. Donna asks Rick, “Are you free of it?”
“Yes, darling, we both are,” he replies confidently.
But as they drive away, a ghostly image of Ms. Milan appears on the screen. In a fitting ending, she turns to the camera and tells us, “That’s what he thinks!”
The Devil's Hand is refreshing in many ways, not least of which is the cult members' penchant for not only calling their cult a cult, but calling their evil cult and evil cult. So many films about cults involve cult members describing their cult as a religious sect or a movement or something equally inoffensive and dull. In The Devil's Hand, the self-described cult worships their self-described evil devil god, which is refreshingly honest.
The Devil's Hand also allows Neil Hamilton's smugness free reign. He might not be the smuggest of all actors, but Mr. Hamilton had a strong control of his facial expressions and was able to dial his smugness from barely perceptible to almost palpable. This gift may not have been used to its fullest advantage in his other work, but it is well-used in The Devil's Hand.
I will not complain, as I sometimes do, that the film's title is somewhat arbitrary (and does not even reference dolls, one of the film's finest assets). Instead, I will speak briefly about William J. Hole, Jr., the film's director, mostly notable for his television work in Westerns and crime shows. In addition to The Devil's Hand, Mr. Hole directed The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow (1959) and the American parts of Face of Terror (1962), revealing his skill as an auteur of lower-budget but charming horror films in the 1960s. Although he is not usually mentioned as an "important" figure of the horror cinema of the 1960s, Mr. Hole was able to create efficient, well-shot, to-the-point horror films, and for that he should be saluted. (Also to be saluted is Jo Heims, who wrote The Devil's Hand as well as 1960's The Girl in Lover's Lane and 1971's Play Misty for Me, and who no doubt contributed to cinema the immortal line of dialogue, "That's she, all right.")