Past Misdeeds: The Amazing Mr. X (1948)

aka The Spiritualist

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Stinking rich widow Christine Faber (Lynn Bari) lost her beloved husband Paul (Donald Curtis) two years ago in the sort of car crash that can only be described with the adjective "fiery". Though Chris has a new beloved in form of the horrifically boring and prosaic district attorney Martin Abbott (Richard "Wooden" Carlson), and a marriage proposal is in the air, she hasn't really come to grips with Paul's death. So it's not that much of a surprise when Chris one night thinks she hears a voice that might very well be Paul's calling out her name - or maybe it was just the sound of the waves hitting the beach close to her villa. On the beach, she doesn't find Paul's ghost, but rather a smarmy guy calling himself Alexis (Turhan Bey) who works on her with a highly practiced psychic spiel full of things no stranger could know about the woman.

At first, Chris is still wavering between fascination and scepticism, but a horrible nightmare, or rather a vision full of barely disguised wedding anxiety (which seems perfectly natural when one is to wed Richard Carlson), puts Chris over the edge, so she decides to visit Alexis in his "professional" capacity. A few tricks later, Chris is a regular customer of the psychic, a fact neither Martin nor her younger sister Janet (Cathy O'Donnell) are too happy with once they find out.

Martin and Chris seek out the help of a detective specialized in debunking phony psychics. Unfortunately, he recommends that Janet pay an pseudonymous visit to Alexis too to make clear that the man's a phony. That would be well and good if not for the fact that Alexis is quite the diligent professional and that Janet is improbably stupid. So now Chris and her sister are completely under the psychics' spell, as if they were a Texan sheriff's department.

Even worse, the psychic's wish for money isn't the biggest problem the sisters have; someone else is playing another game with them for even higher stakes.

The Amazing Mr. X is that most curious of animals, a fake psychic movie whose script is actually carefully constructed so that the supposedly supernatural occurrences are all accounted for and explained through more than just some cop shouting "phony psychic!" and some hand-waving in the film's final five minutes. Instead, the film's two scriptwriters explain what's going on early and often, and it's quite obvious that they have actually put some thought into the way a con like this would work in the real world. Then, because it would be a bit boring and obvious otherwise, they add a second, much more lethal con that sometimes crosses over with the first one to confuse matters and add moments of actual physical menace to the film.

It's a very effective combination based on honesty towards the film's audience and shows a belief in the usefulness of suspense to carry a movie that still wasn't all that common at that point in time. The Amazing Mr. X is pretty much what happens when the fake psychic movie is kidnapped by the early thriller.

The film's weaknesses are all on the acting side: while Turhan Bey and Lynn Bari work their respective melodramatic acting styles very well and quite nuanced, Richard Carlson is the sort of non-entity US movies of the 40s, 50s and 60s just loved to inflict on their audiences as their supposed heroes. Charmless, humourless and with the personality of a very boring robot, the best thing I can say about Carlson's performance is that he's not on screen all that often. The other problem child is Cathy O'Donnell's Janet Burke. Parts of her acting troubles are probably caused by the script’s indecisiveness on the question if Janet's the younger sister who has always mothered her older sibling, or an especially stupid twelve year old in the body of a twenty year old. O'Donnell's performance suggests she doesn't have an idea about that either, which results in her acting like a time-displaced moe character in 40s clothes. Unfortunately, she's much more important to the success or failure of the movie than Carlson is.

Getting back to the more positive aspects of The Amazing Mr. X, future blacklist victim Bernard Vorhaus's direction is often quite inventive. Even if the rest of the film were completely without merit, the staging of Chris's nightmare sequence and her near death in the final part of the movie alone would be worth watching; the former is as fine an example of the psychoanalytically influenced dream sequence so beloved of noir and its sister genres as you will find, while the latter is a wonderful example of how to make a difficult to stage scene look natural.

Vorhaus had excellent help in making his film moody and impressive too. His director of cinematography was John Alton, one of the DoPs of noir cinema. Alton brought much of the non-genre's visual trappings with him to films like this which most people wouldn't exactly call noirs (for my definition, The Amazing Mr. X lacks the nihilist streak of the "true" noir, but your mileage and definition will vary). There are moments of great visual beauty to be found throughout the film, beauty that lies in the expected atmospheric play of shadows as well as in Alton's often stunning use of light on reflecting surfaces that turns the film's world into a place where light and shadow are at once less real and more real than in our world.

Come to think of it, that's pretty much what Alexis makes his money with in the movie, too, which makes it an exceptionally clever addition to an exceptionally clever film.