By
Hank Reineke
In early December of 1947 Box Office made note that producer Ben Stoloff’s Eagle Lion “film
factory” – an American arm of Britain’s Rank Organisation - was to begin production
of two new pictures. The first was Brooklyn U.S.A, a dramatic film to
recount the Ebbets Field barrier-shattering saga of Brooklyn Dodger Jackie
Robinson. The second was Bernard
Vorhaus’s The Spiritualist, a mystery
to serve as a starring vehicle for Turhan Bey, the suave actor having recently been
released from his contract at Universal. December of ’47 had already been a busy period for Eagle Lion, the
company having rushed through the noir
crime-dramas The Cobra Strikes and Assigned to Danger. Stoloff assured the studio would remain busy following
the holidays. Principal photography on The Spiritualist was scheduled to
commence in January of 1948.
The primary castings for The Spiritualist were soon being announced in the trades. Lynn Bari was cast in the principal role of Christine
Faber, a grieving well-to-do widow who lives in a sprawling mansion on the Pacific
cliffs. Her proximity to the ocean is a
mixed blessing. Faber hears the ghostly voice
of her beloved dead husband Paul (Donald Curtis) – reportedly killed in a fiery
automobile accident -rolling in with the evening tide. The role of the lawyer Martin Abbott, the
kind current paramour of the widow Faber, was filled on January 10 when it was
announced that Richard Carlson had been cast as the “top male” in the feature.
The earliest scenario of The Spiritualist was drafted by Crane Wilbur, a journeyman writer-director-actor-playwright
who had been kicking around Hollywood since the silent era. Muriel Roy Bolton was commissioned to write
the screenplay from Crane’s treatment. Director
Vorhaus thought the ideas behind The
Spiritualist intriguing, but was of the opinion Bolton’s script lacked
“characterization and humor.” The
screenplay’s absence of humor was odd, especially as Bolton was primarily known
for her scripting of several “Henry Aldrich” comedies of the 1940s. In any case, Vorhaus belatedly brought Brit Ian
McLellan Hunter onto the project. Vorhaus was familiar with Hunter’s work: the
two had collaborated on a trio of films in the years 1939-1940. In Vorhaus’s memory, Hunter’s reworking of
the script necessitated the drafted scenarist to labor a full week’s time,
working both “day and night,” to tidy and tighten things up.
The basic premise of The
Spiritualist was Christine’s falling for the con of the flimflamming
trickster known simply as “Alexis” (Turhan Bey). Taking advantage of his grieving clients,
Alexis – whose calling card advertises his services as “Psychic Consultant” -
uses all sorts of supernatural malarkey to convince his clientele that he
possesses “secrets of the outer world.” Amongst his subterfuges to gain “insight” into his patsies is a rigged
spirit cabinet, a closed-circuit television monitor, wire recorders, room
temperature regulators, and projection cameras. He even secrets an earpiece beneath his turban, a hidden confederate
slipping him information from a remote location.
The influence of Alexis’s “readings” on the emotionally-distressed
Christine raises the concern – and suspicion – of boyfriend Martin and Faber’s younger
sister, Janet (Cathy O’Donnell). They
hire a private detective (Harry Mendoza) to investigate the background of this
alleged “spookchaser.” But there’s a second, and more nefarious, development they
miss entirely. They soon learn that the emotional
manipulation of Christine is more than a simple money-grabbing swindle. The initial ruse serves only as a prelude to a
far darker plan orchestrated by a second mysterious figure in the shadows.
Just as The
Spiritualist was starting production, a United Press Hollywood
correspondent reported that the office of producer Stoloff was under
siege. Hundreds of phone calls and
letters were – reportedly – pouring in from enraged members of the National
Associations of American Spiritualists as well as from other devout
practitioners. It’s hard to separate the
reality from the ballyhoo of such reporting, but Stoloff allegedly tried to salve
the fears of complainants by assuring his film was only interested in exposing
“crooked” mediums, not all. But a
secretary at Eagle Lion suggested the angry spiritualists were not easily
appeased. She reported that, “Mr.
Stoloff’s received countless letters placing a ‘hex’ on him.”
On May Day of 1948, it was announced The Spiritualist was to be released on July 7, the trades
trumpeting the Hollywood’s summer schedule of 1948 was shaping up to be a more
profitable season than that of the previous year. (In actuality, the film’s release appears to
have been pushed back to early August). In any case, the “hex” put on the film seems to have been at least
partly successful. Though Variety was impressed, describing the
picture as “a whale of a yarn,” “expertly directed” and featuring “topflight
performances,” exhibitors and audiences seemed nonplussed as the film rolled
out regionally across the U.S. and overseas throughout 1948-1949.
London’s
Picturegoer thought the film, a “Poor spiritualistic
melodrama, wholly unconvincing, with the artists concerned completely at sea
owing to the ineffectiveness of both characterization and direction.” One exhibitor told Box Office sighed that while The
Spiritualist had attracted only an “average draw” during screenings, he
thought the film deserved better. It was,
in his opinion, well done if perhaps reminiscent of that same year’s noir Sleep, My Love featuring Claudette
Colbert and Robert Cummings.
The producers of The
Spiritualist – mindful of their accounting ledgers - were of the surprised opinion
that such superstitious belief in mediums and séances was more deeply entrenched
than anyone guessed. So, in February of 1949
with plenty of markets still unvisited, Eagle Lion made a decision to re-title The Spiritualist to The Amazing Mr. X. In the
end, the name change did not appear to make much of a difference at the box
office. By May of 1949 the film was
still on the circuit but still not doing particularly well.
One Kentucky-based exhibitor decried the picture’s walk-up
business as “simply awful.” He also
opined the film’s lack of dramatic action – as well as “poor” sound and too-dark
photography - was to blame. He counseled
other “small town exhibitors” to “lay off this one” as it “laid an egg at the
box office.” With the film was still
making the rounds in August of ‘49, other exhibitors complained the picture,
while generally solid, was “too talky in parts and the sound was very
low.” It was thought the spiritualism hoax
was given up to early in the film, removing any sense of a suspenseful reveal. Both were valid criticisms. It’s true that most of the films on-screen
time was consigned to intimate parlour discussions.
The film suffered overseas as well. In England, the Rank Organisation and British
Board of Film Censors were also inundated with complaints by spiritualists, though
censors ultimately chose to allow the film to be exhibited as issued. This caused an aggrieved “former president of
the Spiritualist National Union” to sulk, “I am amazed that such a malicious
and offensive statement about spiritualism should be passed for exhibition
purposes.”
Though not a lost classic, The Spiritualist/The Amazing Mr. X has a lot going for it. The film is wonderfully shot and the film’s spooky
and spectral optical effects are certainly effective. In an interview with the Australian
journalist John Baxter, Vorhaus gave all credit to Director of Photography John
Alton for the film’s dark and moody visuals. Vorhaus recalled Alton as, “faster and more talented than any other
cameraman I’d ever worked with, partly because he used so little lighting… He
regarded shadow and darkness as just as important as light. So you never had a fully lit set; you had
this mix of highlights and darkness.” The film is also made interesting by Vorhaus’s interesting camera
placements. The film is sprinkled with a
number of creative attention-getting and undeniably unusual camera angles. The film’s acting troupe are uniformly
top-notch in their performances.
The
Spiritualist would sadly be among the last few films
Vorhaus would direct in America – or anywhere. On April 25, 1951, director Edward Dmytryk – a member of the infamous Hollywood
Ten who served a six-month prison sentence for his “uncooperative” testimonials
- chose to salvage his career by ingratiating himself with the House
Un-American Committee. In new testimony,
Dmytryk gave the Committee the names of seven members of the Screen Directors
Guild who he alleged were members of the Communist Party in 1945. Vorhaus’s name was among them.
With the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases being reported
daily and the war in Korea grabbing headlines, Vorhaus saw little reason to
stay in Hollywood. The director chose to
live out his life as an American exile, doing a bit of film work in Europe
before quitting the movie business altogether. He would later settle in London and be granted British citizenship. There was no reason or benefit of returning
to America - at least not at the height of red scare paranoia. It was our loss, as well as his.
This Blu-ray issue of The
Amazing Mr. X from the folks at The Film Detective is top-notch, a 4K
transfer mastered from restored original 35mm elements and presented in an
aspect ratio of 1.37:1. The B&W film
looks wonderful, film grain present and Alton’s exquisite photography bringing
out the almost unnaturally soft facial features of the film’s featured players,
especially the ladies. Special features
include Daniel Griffith’s interesting twenty-minute featurette, Mysteries Exposed. The documentary offers a brief primer on the
history of spiritualism and its subsequent exploitation by filmmakers: from the
silent short camera trickeries of George Méliès to RKO’s You’ll Find Out (1940) through such Universal features as The Devil Commands (1941) to various entries
in their Inner Sanctum series to
Paramount’s The Uninvited (1944).
The documentary features some interesting background on
spiritualism, séances and mediums – and of the practice’s historical debunkers,
many of whom were magicians wise to their slight-of-hand methodologies. The featurette offers commentaries courtesy
of Lisa Morton, author of Calling the
Spirits: A History of Séance’s, and of film historian C. Courtney
Joyner. The set also includes a
commentary by film scholar Jason A. Ney and ten-page booklet, mostly recounting
the star-crossed career of Turhan Bey, written by Don Stradley. As always, The Film Detective delivers a very
nice, lovingly assembled package of a film too often misused due to its public-domain
status.
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