Phantoms, Inc. (MGM, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the 1940 The Letter on September 11, 2025, Turner Classic Movies followed it up with an unusually good entry in MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series, a 1945 film called Phantoms, Inc. This was about confidence men in general and phony “spiritualists” in particular. The principal villain is Dr. Rupert Trykel (Arthur Shields, the go-to guy for blarney-filled Irishmen just then if you couldn’t get Barry Fitzgerald), who runs a fake psychic operation. His main pigeons in the part of the story we see are Philip Kenneson, Sr. (Frank Reicher) and his wife Martha (Ann Shoemaker), who are anxious about the fate of their son Philip Kenneson, Jr. (Wally Cassell – we never see him as a living character but he appears in enough still photos and flashbacks they needed an actor to play him). Philip was serving as a private in the South Pacific in World War II, and to his parents he’s just dropped off the radar screen. They don’t know if he’s alive or dead, and whether he’s in a Japanese prisoner of war camp being tortured or has met some equally sinister and unpleasant fate. So they go to Dr. Trykel, whose séances are surprisingly un-elaborate. I’ve often complained to my husband Charles that I miss the old-fashioned gimmicks phony psychics of old used to pull on their marks in the movies about them, including either actors or dummies made to look like ghosts and toy trumpets suspended by wires in mid-air representing the voices of the dead speaking from the spirit world. Charles pointed out that most of the phony psychics of today are trying to land gigs on TV, and the lighting needed for a TV show would expose such blatant fakery. Instead they rely on so-called “cold readings,” the sort of thing where the alleged psychic says things like, “I see a red dress … no, it was a blue dress,” and the mark says, “You’re right! It was a blue dress!”

Dr. Trykel and all the other people at the séance, who are all part of his gang, extensively research the life of Philip Kenneson, Jr. and find out that he was a star student and he had a girlfriend named Enid. In the pre-Internet age they do this by researching the morgues of the local newspaper and interviewing people who knew him, including his former high-school principal, ostensibly for a story they’re doing on the local boys who are off fighting the war. When the Kennesons try to give him money for his services, Dr. Trykel at first makes a show of refusing any more than $10, his customary fee for a séance, but later he says they can donate to our foundation (the payee on the check is actually “Our Foundation”!). Mr. Kenneson makes a one-time donation of $200 to “Our Foundation” and then stops giving Trykel money, but Mrs. Kenneson is hooked big-time and gives Trykel their entire life savings. We see how far they’ve gone into debt from a pile of past-due notices on bills they’ve received. Then, when the Kennesons no longer have any money he can extract from them, Trykel cuts them off completely – only Mrs. Kenneson won’t take no for an answer. At first she tries to report Trykel to the police, but the cops tell her that Trykel has been careful to stay within the bounds of the law and therefore there’s nothing they can do to help her or get her money back. Then she goes to Trykel’s live-work space with a gun and demands to see him, only in the end Trykel kills her and her husband finally reports him to the police and they arrest him. Quite well directed by Harold Young (whom I’ve previously faulted for having made potentially great movies like The Scarlet Pimpernel considerably less entertaining than they could have been, but this time he’s just fine) from an “original” story by Brainerd Duffield and a script by Edward Bock, and well photographed by Jackson Rose, Phantoms, Inc. is a well-done entry in this quite lengthy (1935 to 1947) series and blessedly avoided much of the blatant moralism that afflicted many entries and was inherent in the very title.