by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Amazing
Mr. X, a 1948 production by
former RKO staff producer Ben Stoloff for the Eagle-Lion company, the former
PRC studio that had just been taken over by J. Arthur Rank to provide a
guaranteed American distribution outlet for his products. (He named his company
after the American and British national animals to underscore the U.K.-U.S.
union aspects of his enterprise, and the first year he owned it he had a
blockbuster mega-hit, The Red Shoes, that drew big grosses on both sides of the Atlantic.) Rank’s
participation indicated higher budgets for the company’s regular product, which
in practice meant being able to hire “B”-list rather than “C”-list actors — the
stars of this one were Lynn Bari (though according to an imdb.com “trivia”
poster the part was originally slated for Carole Landis, only just before
shooting was to start she killed herself after Rex Harrison ended their affair
and returned to his wife), Turhan Bey and Cathy O’Donnell. The plot, an
original story (and for once the O-word is actually merited) by Crane Wilbur
scripted by Muriel Roy Bolton and Ian McLellan Hunter, casts Bari as Christine
Burke Faber, widowed two years earlier but still clinging to the memory of her
husband Paul (Donald Curtis). She still lives in the beach house they shared (a
stunning exterior — almost certainly a model — that virtually becomes a
character in the movie itself), she’s still got his picture almost everywhere
she goes (and it does look
like he’s watching her!), and as the movie opens she goes out on her balcony
and thinks she hears his voice calling out to her. The only other people living
there are her sister Janet (Cathy O’Donnell), who’s just at that awkward
late-teen age where she’s collecting boyfriends like other people collect
stamps (though we never see any of these young swains, we know they exist when Christine and Janet
are both going on dates the same night and Janet confesses she’s forgotten the
name of the man who’s going to pick her up for a date that night). Christine
has a suitor, Martin Abbott (Richard Carlson), who’s bought her an engagement
ring, but she’s too busy walking the beach and communing with her husband’s
spirit to have much use for a decent but rather dull living boyfriend. She’s
approached by a fake psychic, Alexis (Turhan Bey), who offers to help her get
in touch with Paul in the great beyond. Martin recruits Janet and a detective
(Harry Mendoza) to get the goods on Alexis — they’ve already discovered he
served a prison term for fraud in Chicago under the name “Monroe” — who’s a
pretty standard-issue fake psychic for a 1930’s and 1940’s movie.
He’s got his
live/work space (it seemed obligatory for all movie psychics just then — except the ones who
made their livings at carnivals — to work out of their homes) tricked out with
gimmicks like a pad on which his customers are supposed to write out their
questions, then fold them and conceal them on their persons (the pad actually
has carbon paper under it so he can read the copy and pretend he’s divined the
question psychically), and a wire recorder he uses to play Paul’s favorite
piece of music (the Chopin prelude, Op. 28, no. 4, which Paul, a pianist, used
to play a lot around Christine). Instead of the usual dummy that represented
the disembodied spirit, Alexis dons black velvet and a mask and plays that part
himself; he’s got a trick chair into which his customers tie him, then lock him
in a cabinet, though by kicking a part of the chair he can easily get out of
the cabinet, slip off the rope and return to the darkened main room to play
ghost. (Fake psychics of this period seem to have a lot more élan than the ones today who fake it with cold readings
— “I see a blue house — no, a pink house … ,” continually guessing until they hit on the right color and
the sucker says, “You’re right! It was a pink house!” — but as
Charles once pointed out to me, modern-day fakers can’t use all the cool
gimmicks of yesteryear because they’re angling for TV contracts and the tricks
of old depended on darkness and would be exposed by the lights used to film for
TV.) Martin’s plot to expose Alexis backfires big-time when Janet falls
head-over-heels in love with him and erases the fingerprints Martin sent her in
to get so he could compare them and prove Alexis is the long-since disgraced
Monroe — only at the next séance, held at Christine’s home at Martin’s
insistence because there Alexis can’t use the elaborate trick equipment he has
at his own place, Paul indeed appears. Paul is able to appear because [spoiler
alert!] he never really died:
instead, he faked his own death as part of a
scheme to get his hands on Christine’s family fortune. (Why? As Alexis asks
him, wouldn’t it have been easier for him to stay married to Christine and kill
her instead of faking his own
death?) Now he insists that Alexis join him in a plot to extract the Burke
fortune by marrying Janet — and when Alexis balks Paul points out that he can
kill with impunity because according to the authorities he’s already “dead.”
The
Amazing Mr. X — a title that, as one
archive.org contributor noted, made it seem like a horror/sci-fi film instead
of a Gothic melodrama verging on noir —is a weird mélange of The Uninvited, Gaslight and Laura, but it deploys the
clichés in sufficiently fresh combinations it actually does seem fresh and original, and essentially it
inverts the usual gender roles of noir by casting two relatively innocent women as victims of gold-digging hommes
fatales. It’s also surprisingly
well directed by someone named Bernard Vorhaus (he got his start in England and
made the quite good film The Ghost Camera as his directorial debut — I remember watching that with Charles and
being pleasantly surprised that the British film industry was capable of making
a great thriller in the mid-1930’s even if Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t directing it! — and later at Republic he made the
equally offbeat The Affairs of Jimmy Valentine, and looked like he’d have a shot at a major
career when he was caught up in the Hollywood blacklist, as was someone else
involved in this film, writer Ian McLellan Hunter) and vividly photographed by
John Alton, who takes full advantage of all the Gothic opportunities of Frank
Durlauf’s set designs (even though one wonders if there’s always fog in the foyer of Alexis’s home) to create
marvelous effects of light and shadow. It’s also pretty well acted by a
second-tier cast — this may be Lynn Bari’s best performance on film, not that
that’s saying much for it, and Cathy O’Donnell’s simpering teen act gets
wearing after a while, but Turhan Bey and Donald Curtis are marvelous as the
bad guys and Richard Carlson is decent and un-creepy enough you really do want Bari to end up with him at the end. The
Amazing Mr. X has acquired a cult
reputation, enough that it deserves a full restoration — the print we were
watching, a download from archive.org, was in relatively good condition, though
the soundtrack was a bit on the muddy side and there were scratches and scratch
noises at the beginnings and ends of each reel, suggesting careless handling of
this print by projectionists — and even under these circumstances it was quite
a movie, with a reversal that for once made sense and a dreamlike (il)logic to
the story that was actually very moving.
