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.

The Maze (1953)

Americanised Scot Gerald McTeam (Richard Carlson) and Kitty Murray (Veronica Hurst) are eloped to be married in two weeks. Things in the happy relationship change when a letter for Gerald arrives asking for his return to his Scottish uncle’s castle as quickly as possible. Reluctantly, Gerald does got to Scotland, leaving Kitty and her aunt Edith (Katherine Emery) behind awaiting a quick return.

However, Gerald does not return; neither does he telegraph nor write (phoning would be right out in the notoriously primitive castle). Only after weeks do the Murrays hear from him in form of a letter to Edith telling of the death of his uncle. In this letter, Gerald breaks off the engagement, declaring he will never be able to see Kitty again while at the same time swearing eternal love. Not terribly surprisingly, this sort of thing doesn’t cut the mustard with the pleasantly strong-minded Kitty, so she decides to grab her aunt and travel to Gerald’s freshly inherited castle to find out what the heck is going on with him.

On their first encounter, Gerald is visibly aged and attempts stone-faced reticence towards his unwanted visitors, wanting them out of the house at once. After some effective pushing by Kitty “at once” turns into “the very next morning”, and soon Gerald finds himself with the Murrays as house guests for a rather longer amount of time. Kitty’s pretty relentless, as you can see. She needs to be, too, for there is some sort of terrible secret hanging over the house like an appropriately gothic shroud. Gerald and his two servants seem to conspire to hide something from the two women, and follow strange house rules that see guests in the house locked in their rooms for the night, treat a certain tower room as taboo, and so on and so forth.

Kitty’s pretty sure there’s something particularly weird going on in the castle’s maze, too, and she’s certainly the kind of woman who’ll do whatever it takes to find out what it is that haunts the man she inexplicably wants to marry.

Despite an ending that is at once a bit too harmless and a bit too pat, and a deep dark secret that looks about as horrifying as the one in Lovecraft’s “Arthur Jermyn” – which is to say, not at all in the most hilarious manner - to my 2016 eyes, William Cameron Menzies’s The Maze is a minor gem, certainly one of the highlights of the cheapest side of Allied Artist’s (which were once Monogram pictures and still often enough shooting on the tiny budgets of their Poverty Row tradition) output.

Many of the film’s virtues are in fact a product of the film’s cheapness, or rather the way its veteran director and production designer chose to film around it. Clearly, if one can’t afford naturalistic (or really, even mildly realistic) sets or locations, then it’s best to not even try for them and instead use a technique that’s a better fit to make much out of little; or I imagine something of that sort to have gone through Menzies’s mind. In any case, the director chose to use very classic expressionist techniques, turning out a film that gains an oppressive mood through many a weirdly angled shadow of the sort that seems to trap the characters in corners (as well as seeming to turn everything into a corner), and framing that should look cramped but feels claustrophobic thanks to the director’s subtle use of peculiar camera angles as well as the man’s tendency to use background and foreground images in much more inventive ways than was usually done in 50’s horror films. It’s one of the handful of American movies of its age that does aim for the gothic instead of the blandly “realistic” and for most of the running time, this approach turns The Maze into a fascinating and effective film.

There are some weaknesses of course. The script – ignoring the ending – is rather good and even well-paced, but there’s a somewhat dubious monster suit to survive for the discerning viewer – even though Menzies makes as much out of it as is humanly possible – and some truly ropy acting in minor roles. Additionally, Carlson seems to have, in one or two scenes to a nearly comical degree, not the faintest idea what his character is about nor how to express it.

Fortunately, Carlson is really more of a plot prop than a character here, for this is certainly Kitty’s tale, not his. And Kitty, well, she’s the very rare example of an independent, head-strong female heroine in a 50s genre film who actually is the audience’s viewpoint character throughout, isn’t “tamed” (shudder) by her man, and is only breaking down as much as is believable. Not surprisingly, Hurst makes the most out of this rare opportunity and together with Emery dominates proceedings for once in her career. Even if the film’s mood wasn’t as strong as it is, Kitty would be reason enough to watch it. As it happens, she’s just one of two very sturdy legs The Maze stands on.

On WTF: The Amazing Mr. X (1948)

aka The Spiritualist

If you ask me, the phony psychic genre is the cause of some of the laziest writing, and some of the most annoying films ever produced. So it came as quite a surprise to me to find The Amazing Mr. X to be a pretty intelligently written and very well-made movie. It's as if everyone involved felt respect for their audience!

Of course, this being a Friday, I'm going to tell you more about the film on WTF-Film.

 

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