The Mind Reader

Mind Reader, The (1933)

*** (out of 4)

Excellent performances highlight this Warner drama about a con man (Warren William) and his assistant (Allen Jenkins) who travel town to town with a circus doing various acts to bring in money. They then notice that the mind reader gag will bring in the most and soon the alias "Chandra" starts pulling people in but there's going to be a price to pay. I had heard so many positive things about this movie that it quickly became one that I searched out and thankfully got to see due to a recent TCM showing. Fans of classic cinema should certainly keep their eyes open for this one as it lives up to its reputation and also delivers some incredible performances. The film is pretty much divided into two halves with the first one dealing with various cons being performed by William. I found all of these games to be incredibly entertaining due in large part to William being able to push them over. It's very important that we believe these cons could actually be pushed over on people and William is so good here that it's never a problem. He slides into this role and never looks back and there's no a single frame in the film where we don't believe what he's doing and saying. Constance Cummings plays the woman he eventually falls in love with and the two share some great moments together and really make their love story believable. The underrated Jenkins does a very good job as well as he has several nice comic moments. The biggest surprise comes from future Bogart wife Mayo Methot who nearly steals the film as a young woman who is given bad advice and comes to let William know about it. I won't spoil what happens but it's pretty unforgettable and she really nails the part. I think the film begins to lose some of its power during the final twenty-five minutes with the last scam starts to be too big and of course there's going to be a moral lesson to pay. Up until then the film is extremely fast, fun and most important features some terrific acting. This film certainly deserves to be better known and hopefully TCM will start to show it more often.

(1933) Mind Reader DRAMA

Con artist and fake fortune teller, Chandra (Warren William) along with his sidekick, Frank (Allen Jenkins) comes to an emotional as well as ethical stumbling block as soon as he begins to fall in love and takes Sylvia (Constance Cummings) in as his personal secretary. Despite it's year, the interesting moments are the showcase of scams they pull which requires more than one person. And I also like the fact that the African American character, Sam (Clarence Muse) wasn't dumb nor degraded down as a second class citizen, it would've been nice if the film showed more of him.

A trio of con artists (Warren William, Allen Jenkins and Clarence Muse) travels from city to city in middle America swindling suckers with a bogus mind reading act featuring William as "Chandra the Great," complete with turban and crystal ball. We the screen audience get to see the trickery behind his apparent clairvoyance, but a pretty, unemployed stenographer (Constance Cummings) is not so fortunate, and besotted with William's talents, joins his itinerant enterprise. Eventually she finds out what is really going on, but by then it's too late because she has fallen in love with her employer, and he with her.

To elaborate further would spoil the impact of this unusual pre-Code film, but I will say that its chief problem is that Cummings is just too smart to be as innocently unaware of certain things as the screenplay tries to make her, so we stop taking the story seriously. However, there remains much witty and mature dialogue, striking cinematography, and this interesting group of performers.

William gets the opportunity to play the on- and offstage modes of his character and also makes the most of an extended drunk scene. Cummings, largely wasted here, projects a tart intelligence that is probably more than the role deserves. Jenkins, the eternal sidekick, gets a generous share of the verbal zingers and Muse's role goes beyond the subservient nonsense usually assigned to black supporting players at that time. Mayo Methot, the future Mrs. Humphrey Bogart, appears briefly as a grief-deranged victim of Chandra's charlatanry.

Like so many feature films of the early 30's, this one moves along briskly so that none of its improbabilities have time to sink in and ruin the fun.

Warren William is "The Mind Reader" in this pre-code film also starring Constance Cummings and Allen Jenkins.

William is a snake oil salesman (a con artist) during the Depression, using his skills of persuasion to sell products. One day, his associate, Frank (Jenkins) is reading about mind readers and thinks it might be a great profession, so William becomes Chandra. He is very successful. When he meets the beautiful Sylvia (Cummings), he falls in love. After an unfortunate incident, he promises her that if she'll stay with him, he'll quit. But the con and the money are seductive.

This is an early talkie and very well directed by Roy del Ruth. Unlike some early talkies, it's not stagy and the actors don't have trouble with the dialogue rhythm. Often in these early films, there are big pauses in between lines, but not here.

Warren William is one of my favorites. He played these dark characters in silents and the early years of sound, and then we were able to hear his wonderful laugh and see his humor in films like the Perry Mason series (though he and the scripts weren't Erle Stanley Gardner's idea of Perry Mason), Satan Met a Lady, The Lone Wolf series, and others.

Constance Cummings was both beautiful and amazing, and she does a lovely job here. She deserved to be a bigger star, but she left Hollywood early on and moved with her husband to England, where she made some films and appeared in her husband's (Benn Levy) plays. When she was around 70, she appeared on Broadway in a play about a stroke victim, Wings, for which she won a Tony Award. This was a great opportunity to see her on film.

Interesting film, kind of a forerunner to "Nightmare Alley" in a way - those movie fortunetellers are always fakes.

What makes this especially entertaining is how it pretends to take itself ever so seriously, but subtly and deliberately, not quite convincingly enough. Humour is often funnier when it's not that obvious and you have to discover it hidden in a serious drama like this.

In this fairly short picture, Warren William has tremendous fun hamming up his moustache twiddling loveable rogue character to a hundred and ten percent. You can't be certain whether it's because you can really sense his own personal enjoyment at playing this role or whether you're being fooled by some good acting but whatever it is, that ninety year old enjoyment is infectious. Although you'll probably forget you've seen this in a few weeks (to be honest, it's not that memorable), you can't help but enjoy watching it.

Since this is a First National B-feature, without the constraints of conforming to the Warner's 'A-picture' conventions, Roy Del Ruth, possibly WB's top director at the time also enjoys this lack of restriction by experimenting with clever shots, wacky camera angles and atmospheric lighting. This makes the result both fun and interesting to watch but it's not just the direction and Warren William which make this picture worth seeing ninety years after it was made. It's actually a good little story with a great snappy script so and if you like 1930s, blue-collar, American speak, you'll find this just swell! Its script benefits from one of the writers being Wilson Mizner. Who? - he was one of America's most celebrated writers having had what might be described as a very eventful life (and yes, movies have been made about him) or as one of his contemporaries said: America's most fascinating outlaw. His street-level wit, nurtured by his own plentiful life experiences add a certain spice to this story which although fairly engaging anyway is made much tastier by the magic of his wordweaving.

Overall, although this is nothing that special with no deep message or even very shallow message, it is reasonably entertaining .