Precognition Ignition

Now Playing: The Clairvoyant (aka The Evil Mind; 1935)

Pros: Thoughtful examination of the lure of fame and the curse of being "different"; Strong performance by Fay Wray
Cons: Dull stretches with Jane Baxter mooning over Claude Rains; Pat, unsatisfying ending

"We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown... the mysterious. The unexplainable. That is why you are here." Criswell, Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

The Amazing Criswell aside, the future isn't what it used to be. Once upon a time in the dim, remote past called the 20th century, the future was big business. Among mystic Edgar Cayce's clients were such luminaries as Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Edison. Nostradamus was a rock star 400 years after he penned his last prophecy. Performers like the Amazing Kreskin routinely popped up on late night television to share their psychic insights. And their predictions dealt with more than just the tiresome minutiae of celebrity life -- they were about war and peace, wealth and poverty, the fortunes of great statesmen and politicians, and even the fate of the earth itself.

Not even the Amazing Criswell could
have predicted the enduring popularity
of Plan 9 from Outer Space

Somewhere along the line we became a little less gullible and a lot more cynical, and as a result lost interest in earth-shattering prophecies. Now, about the only interest we have in the future is wondering what boneheaded thing the Kardashians will do next, or what Jennifer Lawrence will do with her hair for the Oscars.

The Clairvoyant was made a long, long time ago, far away across the pond. The fading British empire was, like the U.S., in the grip of a deep, grinding depression. Of course, people needed distractions from the everyday cares of life, and music halls were all the rage. Many of the stages were occupied by blindfolded mentalists who could still wow the rubes by sending their assistants out into the audience to procure personal items that the performers would identify with their "second sight." It was a far more innocent time than our own.

Maximus, portrayed by the amazing Claude Rains, is a garden-variety mentalist. At the beginning of the film, we see him practicing his routine with his wife and stage assistant Rene (Fay Wray).There's a lot of mental energy involved in the act, but it has nothing to do with psychic abilities. Maximus has a big job to do, memorizing all the various permutations of "Now what am I holding in my hand Maximus?" and all the personal articles they stand for ("Now what am I holding?" might mean a billfold and "Can you tell what I'm holding?" a tie-pin; Criss Angel's Mindfreak this ain't.)

At a routine performance, a party of rich, insouciant trust-funders is watching from the expensive seats. They're on to Maximus' act, and try to get Rene to come over to their box for a unique personal item they know the mentalist and his assistant haven't prepared for. Rene studiously avoids them. The commotion from the spoiled rich kids throws off Rene's and Maximus' timing, and the audience grows restless as they see Maximus struggling. One member of the rich kids' party, Christine (Jane Baxter), isn't interested in revealing the act as a fake. She seems genuinely enthralled by Maximus.

The fake mentalist has his first real psychic vision.

A short time later, the act calls for Rene to disappear from the stage and reappear in a balcony at the back of the theater. Not having adequately rehearsed, she finds the door to the stairway locked. As she looks for another way to the balcony, Maximus is obviously in trouble all by himself on the stage. The audience starts to fidget, then turns ugly, clapping their hands and hooting while Christine watches the hapless performer from her box. Suddenly, Maximus stares off into space. An older man stands up in the front row, challenging the struggling mentalist. "What have I got here?" he sneers as he holds up a piece of paper. "A letter… about your wife… from the hospital," Maximus intones. "That letter is two days old… you'd better go to your wife…" The man's face falls -- Maximus has nailed it -- and he quickly leaves as the rest of the audience goes quiet. "And you…" he says, staring now at Christine. "I see a railway journey… I see…" He collapses and the act is cut short as the stage hands drop the curtain.

Cut to a train speeding through the countryside at night. Maximus and his entourage -- wife, mother (Mary Clare) and manager Simon (Ben Field) are traveling to their next gig, and discussing what happened at the theater. Mother reveals that her father, Maximus' grandfather, had true psychic abilities. Maximus assures his worried wife that it only happened once, and may never again. Simon hopes it will show itself again-- "we could make our fortunes!" Wise to the psychic world, mother speculates that someone in the audience emanated a kind of psychic energy, like a battery, that jumpstarted Maximus' visions.

The same girl (Christine) from the theater walks past the group in the rail car. "I've seen that girl before," Maximus says as he goes into a near-trance. Suddenly his eyes widen as he recalls his vision of Christine's railway journey at the theater. He jumps up and pulls the emergency cord to stop the train, explaining to the exasperated conductor and everyone within earshot that the train is going to crash. Maximus, his entourage and a small group of excited people including Christine disembark. A little while later when they learn from a station master that the train did indeed crash, Christine immediately gets on the phone to her father, a wealthy newspaper man (Lord Southwell, played by Athole Stewart).

Moon-eyed Christine (Jane Baxter)
is the "battery" that jump starts
Maximus' psychic powers.

Southwell's paper publishes the scoop of Maximus' disaster prediction, and suddenly the middling mentalist is the talk of London, not to mention the hottest ticket in town. Maximus takes to wearing expensive smoking jackets and self-satisfied smirks. He negotiates an unheard-of deal to appear at the London Palindrome. He has his own column in Southwell's paper. He hobnobs with the cream of English society. His fame only grows when he publicly predicts that a hundred-to-one shot will win the Derby. (When another horse beats his pick across the finish line, it seems for a moment that he's lost his gift -- until the apparent winner is disqualified and the long shot horse picks up the win.)

It's not long before the downside of fame and fortune rears its ugly head. Christine is obviously the psychic battery for Maximus' gift -- he only goes into his trances in her presence. As the newspaper heiress spends more and more time with the swollen-headed psychic, the loyal and long-suffering wife is increasingly pushed to the side. As she packs up to leave, Maximus sees his mother's death before it happens.

Brought together by the tragedy, Rene tries to get her husband to see that this power fueled by Christine is bad, but like an addict, Maximus is reluctant to part with the "gift" that has made him a celebrity. Then, just when it seems things can't get any worse for the man torn by family and fame, he makes a prediction about a major tunnel disaster that will come back to haunt him…

Maximus and Rene are apprehensive as a nearby
clock tower seems to toll for the end of their marriage.

I first became aware of this obscure Claude Rains / Fay Wray drama-thriller when I stumbled across it browsing through the Internet Archive. I filed it away in my mind to watch later, and just recently, almost two years later, I finally got around to it. It's both a somewhat dewy-eyed artifact of its time, and a quite sophisticated examination of classic hubris. A young, handsome Claude Rains is at his easygoing best in the early going as he banters with his wife over details of his stage act. Later, we feel for the man, yet want to reach through the screen and shake him, as he struggles with the temptations of fame and fortune even as his beautiful, adoring wife gets ready to bail out.

Fay Wray as Rene and Mary Clare as Maximus' mother are also exceptionally good as each in turn tries to save him from his own hubris and the unwitting psychic clutches of uber-groupie Christine. On the other hand, Jane Baxter as Christine spends most of the film staring at Maximus with moon eyes (or is she just constipated?). In spite of ol' Moon Eyes, Maximus' first encounter with the power within himself is very effective. The turnaround from a blown stage act to a genuine encounter with the unknown is sudden and jarring: Maximus pulls off his blindfold, and with Christine's eyes locked on him, he goes into a trance. His face, just a moment before in shadows, is suddenly suffused with an eerie light. When it's clear that he can somehow see the man's letter about his hospitalized wife, his simple words "you'd better go to your wife" are chilling. By comparison, Maximus' later trances are anticlimactic. (And unfortunately, Rains goes way over the top toward the end when his character is trying to convince the workmen that the tunnel they're working on is going to collapse and flood on them.)

The desperate psychic implores the workers
to stay away from the tunnel.

The other impressive thing about The Clairvoyant is its sophisticated treatment of the subject of so-called psychic powers. Are they real, or does the very act of predicting the future set in motion forces and emotions that make it self-fulfilling? An angry railroad man tells Maximus that by stopping the train, he caused it to be late, which contributed to the accident. And the managers of the tunnel project claim that Maximus so unnerved their men with his hysterical warnings, they brought about the disaster in their haste to get their jobs done and get out of the tunnel.

In spite of its disappointing wrap-it-up-with-a-pretty-bow ending, this modest old B movie leaves the viewer with a few things to think about. Who could have predicted that?

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Where to find it:

The Internet Archive

Amazon Instant Video

Netflix Instant Watch

Bonus Mentalist Act: The Prediction (Episode 10, 1st season of Thriller, the Boris Karloff-hosted TV series,1960-1962)

The Clairvoyant reminded me of one of the better 1st season episodes of the old Thriller series from the early 1960s, so I watched it again, thinking it might have been based on the same source material as the movie. Both share the same premise, about a fake mentalist who suddenly acquires real psychic powers. But while The Clairvoyant was based on a novel, The Prediction seems to have been filmed from an original teleplay. It's a distinct possibility that writer Donald Sanborn saw the movie at some point and was either overtly or subconsciously influenced. The opening mentalist act scenes are very similar to one another. Boris himself plays Mace the Mentalist, decked out in a fancy cape, white gloves, and mystic turban. Like Maximus, when a member of the audience starts heckling him, demanding to know who will win the big boxing match, he falters, then suddenly seems to connect with an authentic psychic plane. "Someone will be killed in the ring!" he says, his voice rising. "The fight must be stopped!" he shouts, running toward the stage exit. In his panic, he tips over a flaming urn and nearly burns the theater down.

Remember, only you can prevent stage fires
caused by freaky psychic visions.

His beautiful assistant Norine (Audrey Dalton), the theater owner and assorted stage hands try to calm him, but he's adamant. Mace insists that Norine's ne'er-do-well father Roscoe (Alan Cailiou) rush over to the boxing arena to talk the organizers into stopping the fight, but instead Roscoe makes a fortune betting against the fighter Mace has predicted will die. When Mace continues to have visions on stage which result in disturbingly accurate predictions (including a brutal end for Norine's gambling, alcoholic father), the stage hands get spooked and start avoiding the weird old codger. Instead of leading to fame and fortune, Mace's newfound gift leads to Cassandra-like misfortune, and his unpredictability gets him fired.

The latter part of the episode involves his prediction of disaster for Norine and her fiance as they head off to get married. He begs them to turn around at once if they see a twisted road sign to Edinburgh. They laugh it off, since they're headed in the opposite direction and couldn't possibly encounter such a sign. Or could they?

This is one of a handful of Thriller episodes (and the only season one episode) that Boris Karloff starred in. It's compelling, suspenseful and well-acted all around -- a showcase episode for a wonderfully eccentric and eclectic show that, like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, featured top-notch acting, writing and production talent. John Brahm, of The Lodger (1944) and Hangover Square (1945) fame, directed.

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Where to find it:

Amazon


"You'd better go to your wife!"

Countdown to Halloween: 13 Classic Fright Flicks

Have you noticed that big box retailers don't even wait for the end of October to start stocking Christmas goodies? One aisle over from the fake headstones, foam rubber bats and plastic skeletons at my local Target store is an advance guard of Christmas lights, ornaments and wreaths, waiting to take over and shove the Halloween stuff into the sale bins the moment the clock strikes midnight, November 1.

As much as I appreciate the winter holidays, they need to wait their turn. This is the season of big ol' full moons, howling dogs, leaves blowing in the wind, Halloween, and of course, horror movies. If Christmas can have twelve days, then I think it's only right that Halloween gets thirteen frightful nights. And what better way to celebrate than with a nice, cozy horror film each night?

So, for the next thirteen nights, I'll be using this blog to let you know what I'm watching. We all have our favorites that we like to dust off and pop in the DVD player this time of year -- use the comment box or send me a note about what you prefer to watch as the night wind whistles through the eaves and the dogs howl outside.

#13: Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

HAlloween MoVie rating:
Perfectly Ghoulish

In 1921 London, brilliant sculptor and wax museum proprietor Ivan Igor (Lionel Atwill) learns to his delight that his wax figures of Joan of Arc and Marie Antoinette have so impressed an influential art critic, that the critic intends to submit Igor's work to the Royal Academy of Art. His dreams are short-lived, however, as that very night his disgruntled business backer tells him that they're completely broke -- the public seems to prefer the morbid exhibits of Jack the Ripper and other notorious murderers at a rival museum. He tells the startled artist that the only way they can recover the money they've lost is to burn the museum down and claim the insurance. Igor tries to stop the desperate businessman from lighting the place up, but after a bitter struggle, he ends up dazed, watching his beloved figures melt in the conflagration.

Flash ahead 12 years, to 1933 New York. In the midst of a raucous New Year's celebration, the body of socialite model Joan Gale (Monica Bannister) is carted off to the morgue, an apparent suicide. Wisecracking, fast talking female reporter Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell) is desperate for a story, as her editor (Frank McHugh) keeps threatening to fire her if she doesn't come up with something newsworthy. On a visit to police headquarters, she gets a tip that Gale may have been murdered by her wealthy playboy boyfriend George Winton (Gavin Gordon). Things really look suspicious when Gale's body is reported missing by the morgue attendants. Florence has her scoop. Visiting Winton in lock-up, she begins to believe he's innocent. Then there's the fact that 8 other bodies have gone missing in the city in the last 18 months.

Winton is released for lack of evidence. In the meantime, Florence accompanies her roommate Charlotte (Fay Wray) to the new "London Wax Museum," where her fiance Ralph works as a sculptor. The museum is being readied for its grand opening. Nosy Florence slips into the building as Charlotte and Ralph talk. She takes a long look at the main attraction, an amazingly lifelike Joan of Arc, who also happens to look amazingly like the recently deceased Joan Gale. The museum is run by Igor, now bound to a wheelchair, with horribly burned hands and legs. He employs the bedraggled, drug-addicted Professor Darcy (Arthur Edmund Carewe), and Hugo, a sinister deaf-mute (Matthew Betz).

As Igor confronts Florence and shows her the door, he spots roommate Charlotte, who is the very embodiment of the cherished Marie Antoinette figure he lost in the London fire. Entranced with Charlotte, Igor is oblivious to Florence, who does some more snooping. She discovers Joan Gale's morgue tag near the Joan of Arc figure. As she grabs Charlotte to leave the museum, she blithely tells Igor, "So long Pops, see you in jail!"

Later that night at the museum opening, Florence enlists Winton to help her follow Darcy, who she suspects is somehow tied in with the morgue theft. Following him into a dark building, she finds a long box -- just the size to contain a body -- down in the cellar. She hides as a hideously scarred man in black comes down the cellar steps and starts dragging the box. The man hears footsteps and quickly steals away. She summons the police, some of whom take off after Darcy as he tries to run away, with the others accompanying Florence to the cellar to examine the contents of the box. They discover that it's filled with illegal liquor-- the building is home to a bootlegging operation, run by none other than Igor's old nefarious business partner. The police capture Darcy who apparently works for both the museum and the bootlegger.

As the police search and interrogate Darcy, they find the engraved watch of judge who had gone missing some time before. Florence has yet another scoop as Darcy, and his employer Igor, are now connected with a second disappearance. Desperate for a fix, Darcy gives it up, telling the police that the new wax museum is in reality a morgue itself, with the wax-covered bodies of Joan Gale, the judge, and others serving as "lifelike" attractions.

The crazed Igor promises Charlotte immortality.

Meanwhile, Charlotte, looking for fiance Ralph at the museum, instead finds creepy Igor. The old man, entranced with his "Marie Antoinette," gets up out of his wheelchair-- obviously not quite as crippled as he let on. He stalks her, then corners her, promising her immortality as an exhibit in his museum…

Directed by Warner Bros. master craftsman Michael Curtiz (who would later win an Oscar for Casablanca), Mystery of the Wax Museum is a lively, if somewhat jarring, mix of wise-cracking reporters, spooky wax figures (some portrayed by live, but very still, actors), and shadowy, expressionistic sets. Employing top talent in every department, it's a true mystery-thriller-horror classic of the 1930s.

Key player: Lionel Atwill, playing a literal two-faced villain in Mystery, fancied himself a sort of Jekyll and Hyde type. In a 1933 interview with Motion Picture magazine, he had this to say about his dual nature: "See, one side of my face is gentle and kind, incapable of anything but love of my fellow man. The other side, the other profile, is cruel and predatory and evil, incapable of anything but the lusts and dark passions. It all depends on which side of my face is turned toward you -- or the camera. It all depends on which side faces the moon at the ebb of the tide." (Paul Meehan, Horror Noir: Where Cinema's Dark Sisters Meet, McFarland, 2011)

Frightful Factoid #1: Mystery was the last major studio movie to be released in the two-color Technicolor process (red and green dyes were combined to produce a limited color spectrum). Three-color Technicolor had already been introduced in 1932, and audiences were clearly not enamored with the more primitive technology. (Wikipedia, Mystery of the Wax Museum)

Frightful Factoid #2: After two-color Technicolor became defunct, many studios threw away the negatives of the obsolete films. Mystery was thought to be a casualty of this policy and a lost film until 1970, when a good 35mm print was found in Jack Warner's personal vault on the Warner Bros. lot. (Wikipedia)