Journalist Matt Corbin (Elliott Reid) is traveling through Wisconsin on a fishing trip and comes across a nearly deserted town where the few inhabitants left are secretive and hostile. A shifty lodge owner named Steve Loomis (Raymond Burr) warns Matt away, claiming all the fish died off mysteriously years ago. The story just makes Matt more curious, and his investigations soon uncover a Kremlin plot to poison the American water supply. Now he just needs to get back to the city alive.
In July 1949, RKO purchased the screen story written by Roy Hamilton. The film was originally set in New England, and was titled The Man He Found; the term "the whip hand" comes from horse racing, and is a metaphor for having the advantage or upper hand.[1] In the original story the villains were escaped German Nazis involved in a plot to hide Adolf Hitler, portrayed by Bobby Watson. When Howard Hughes viewed the completed film in November 1950, he announced that Nazis were no longer villains, Communists were, and ordered portions of the film reshot.[4][1] Wheeler W. Dixon writes that "The Whip Hand compels the viewer's attention through the sheer visual frenzy of its violent, aggressive camera work, coupled with its nightmarish, forced-perspective sets, which seems to overpower both the view and the film's protagonists."[5]
Location shooting took place in Big Bear Lake as well as at RKO's ranch in Encino.
A review of the film at Cinema Sentries described it as "a Cold War paranoia flick about those darned Communists" and a "fun Red Scare outing" that "isn't really bad," although at the box office it "flopped about like a germ-infested trout out of water before being doomed to a life of late night television obscurity."[6] Critic Gregory Meshman described it as a "curious film, which manages to generate some tension and suspense along the way," that "Menzies [...] provides able direction and manages to get good performances from the film's no-big-names cast," and that "it's kind of like Bad Day at Black Rock, where a loner insists on solving a terrible secret despite the fact that the whole town is in on the conspiracy."[7]
