by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a film Charles and I
recently downloaded from archive.org: Religious Racketeers, a.k.a. The Mystic Circle Murder, a production of Fanchon Royer Features from 1939
(Royer’s films generally had unusually good production values for independent
movies of the late 1930’s) originally shot under the Religious Racketeers title but changed either before or shortly after
the original release, probably because Religious Racketeers would suggest a story about crooked evangelists
when the film is actually about crooked spiritualists. The central character is
a phony medium called The Great LaGagge, a.k.a. Louis LaGagge (Robert Fiske,
turning in a solid performance though sometimes I wished the producers had cast
Bela Lugosi in the role, especially after his superb performance as a phony
medium in The Black Camel), and the film begins at a party being thrown by Mrs. Ada Bernard
(Betty Compson, silent-screen veteran who occasionally got good parts in
otherwise wretched movies in the 1930’s and generally out-acted the rest of the
cast, as she does here). She’s a client of LaGagge’s — he’s promised to get her
in touch with her late husband and she’s also fallen in decidedly unrequited
love with him — and she’s invited several guests for a séance, among them
millionaire steel heiress Martha Morgan (Helene Le Berthon) and her boyfriend,
reporter Elliot Cole (Arthur Gardner).
Frank O’Connor directed and also came up
with the screenplay, though Charles Condon has a co-writer credit, and it’s
essentially an assemblage of fake-spiritualist movie clichés — it’s plotted
pretty much along the lines of the 1933 Warners production The Mind Reader and the indie, also from 1933, Sucker Money (with Mischa Auer engagingly anti-typecast as the
phony swami), though with a few fascinating wrinkles, notably a plot that takes
the characters out of the U.S. and first to Egypt and then to India (one
Bhogwan Singh got a technical-adviser credit for the Indian sequences, even
though they’re nothing more than a few stock shots of pilgrims approaching or
bathing in the Ganges and a parade of relatively dark-skinned extras walking
down a vaguely exotic set, probably recycled from another film). LaGagge
hatches a plot to weasel Martha’s million dollars out of her by promising to
get her in touch with her recently deceased mother — apparently she was doing
the Grand Tour in Europe when mom died and she’s never forgiven herself for not
being by her mom’s bedside when she croaked — and of course Elliot is not only
a disbeliever in spiritualism, he’s convinced LaGagge is a crook (especially
when he finds a clipping in his newspaper’s morgue with a picture of LaGagge
under a headline calling him “The Great Garno”) and is trying to get Martha to
see through him. This gets considerably harder when Elliot’s editor asks him to
write a puff piece on Martha — a sort of lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous
thing — only the editor has other people rewrite it to suggest that Martha has
become an antisocial recluse, and Martha is so upset at being trashed in a
piece with her boyfriend’s byline she stops speaking to him for several reels.
Meanwhile, LaGagge is feeling the heat because Mrs. Harry Houdini (playing
herself and providing enough exploitation opportunities that Royer actually
briefly considered calling the film Madame Houdini Speaks) has taken up her late husband’s cause of exposing
fake mediums: she announces that when her husband died 10 years earlier he gave
her, on his deathbed, a code message that he would communicate to her from the
Great Beyond, and if any medium purported to be in contact with his spirit but
didn’t reproduce this message, she would know that person was a fake. Mrs.
Houdini — who not only doesn’t look a bit like Janet Leigh but reads all her
lines in a first-day-of-drama-school monotone and proves utterly unable even to
play herself — holds what she announces will be her last séance, and if it
doesn’t produce the secret message her husband left her just before he died,
she will denounce all mediums
as fakes. This duly happens, and things get hot for LaGagge and all the other
mediums in town (not that we actually see any of the others!), and Wilson
(David Kerman), the ex-con LaGagge has hired as his assistant (and whose
proletarian accent and gangster slang makes him a breath of fresh air in the
otherwise pretentious world of phony “mystic” mumbo-jumbo this film inhabits),
warns him not to get the hots for Martha but just to separate her from her
money. To do that, LaGagge and Wilson conceive the idea of sending her to Egypt
with contact with her mom as the lure — and for some reason LaGagge disguises
himself as an Egyptian and does a séance there after hiding out on the ship and
having Wilson send Martha and Ada (who has accompanied her) notes supposedly
blown in from the spiritual ether. Ada notices the “Egyptian” prophet’s
physical similarity to LaGagge, but he convinces her that “all prophets project
the same aura.” Cole follows the principals to Egypt and LaGagge reports him to
the Egyptian authorities, who arrest him, but after having got only $25,000 of
Martha’s fortune LaGagge decides that he has to flee again.
He orders Martha
and Ada to go to India, and once again disguises himself so he can meet with
Martha and convince her to donate half her fortune to the spiritualist cause
(i.e., to himself), only Cole is still on their trail (how he got out of an
Egyptian prison is left cheerily unexplained by the O’Connor-Condon script) and
LaGagge decides to use a “transmutation” trick he’s done before. He will encase
himself in his “Indian Prophet” drag in a block of ice, have himself thrown in
the Ganges, and re-emerge as LaGagge, claiming to have visited the spirit world
in the meantime. The ice is ventilated so the person inside it can breathe, but
LaGagge and Wilson forget this when Elliot crashes their temple, rips off
LaGagge’s wig and beard, and is about to expose him. They put Elliot inside the
ice block, thinking it will kill him, only Elliot discovers the ventilation
apparatus and survives. In the final sequence, LaGagge stages a séance and
fakes the voice of Martha’s mother — which [surprise!] is what finally convinces her he’s a phony, since
her mom never spoke: she was mute. Out of love for Martha, LaGagge tries to
give her back the $25,000 he took from her, only Wilson kills him and Martha
and Elliot flee. Back home, they read a headline that Wilson was arrested by
the Indian authorities for LaGagge’s murder and Elliot’s partner on the police
department, Inspector Burke (Robert Frazer), is there as he proposes and she
accepts. (The American Film Institute Catalog synopsis says that Mrs. Houdini makes another
appearance at the end to proclaim once again the phoniness of all
spiritualists, but that scene was missing from the print we saw.)
Religious
Racketeers differs from most
anti-spiritualist movies in that it doesn’t bother to show just how the fake
mediums do their tricks (there’s a quite convincing one in the opening sequence
in which LaGagge has the guests at Ada’s party write their questions on slips
of paper, then ceremonially burns them in a large metal bowl, then new slips of paper appear in the bowl containing the
answers — and Martha is taken in by him in the first place because the answer
to her question is written in a
convincing simulacrum of her mom’s handwriting, which makes one wonder how
LaGagge knew what Martha’s mom’s handwriting looked like) and in its bizarre
traipsing around the world even though we wonder whether all the bills for
traveling, renting “temples” in each new city and the like aren’t going to
deplete Martha’s fortune so much that LaGagge’s “take” will hardly be worth all
the trouble. The film also doesn’t bother to explain the odd intercom system
that announces, in a heavily distorted “spiritual” voice, whenever anyone is
approaching LaGagge’s live-work space.
The weirdest thing about this movie is
how uneven it is: director O’Connor’s images are appropriately Gothic for the
tale (particularly the marvelous wrought-iron gate at his U.S. temple) — the
cinematographer is future PRC stalwart Jack Greenhalgh — but the film was
obviously shot on such a short schedule that several times the actors blew
their lines and O’Connor didn’t take time out to retake. (In at least one of
those instances, a conversation between Cole and Inspector Burke, Arthur
Gardner’s hesitation and stumbling over his line actually adds to the
believability of the scene since it makes it seem like he’s a normal person
stumbling over his words in the course of a normal conversation.) The
performances themselves are also uneven: Le Berthon in particular is
attractive, has real screen “presence,” and delivers her lines convincingly in
her scenes with Gardner as her skeptical boyfriend — but when she’s supposed to
be under LaGagge’s spell she’s utterly unable to deliver the “spiritual”
malarkey he’s feeding her with any degree of conviction. Religious
Racketeers is an odd curio — hardly
in the same league as such previous fake-psychic movies as The Mind Reader and Sucker Money or a later film that’s the best fake-psychic movie
of all, Nightmare Alley, but well
worth seeing anyway even though Betty Compson’s old-school professionalism
beats out the rest of the cast (though the fate of her character is just
another one of this film’s many loose ends!).
