Interesteg What makes it different from others?

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

dougdoepke A con-man works his way up the fortune-telling ladder only to find his life is not made better.The con-man role is tailor made for the commanding Warren William. His Chandra The Fortune Teller is such a masterful stage presence who in the audience would dare challenge his psychic gift. Never mind that his shifty confederate Frank (Jenkins) is feeding him answers telephonically. It makes for a heckuva show, and the rubes keep coming, sometimes ruefully so. Oddly, I found myself being anxious when there's problems with the messaging relay from Frank. That is, do I really want Chandra to succeed in his criminal con job. Yet I couldn't help being torn. Anyway, notice in passing, how the map shows Chandra first touring smaller border state towns, nothing big yet. That will come later, once he hones his act. Cummings (Sylvia) makes an attractive love interest, even if the script presents her flip-flops in a pretty implausible light. Also, the familiar Allen Jenkins plays his part pretty straight, unlike many of his comedic side-kick parts. Now, you might think, courtesy the screenplay, that every upper-class husband in New York has a silken mistress, leaving a broken-hearted wife behind. Then too, I suspect that dark suspicion played well with Depression era audiences. But once Chandra goes big-time, there are no more rubes, only the sleek and well upholstered. Frankly, I didn't like the big turnaround that comes last. After all, this is pre-Code, so abject mea-culpa endings aren't required as they soon would be. Up to that point, the story really deserves a climax more ironic than the implausibly conventional. (Check out the similar Nightmare Alley {1947} for a more apt ending.)Anyway, William has to be one of the neglected delights of that long ago period. Passing away in 1948 means he had no post-war credits to speak of. Thus he's largely unknown even to many old movie fans. It's that pre-Code period, before his serial programmers (Perry Mason, the Lone Wolf), where he really shines, usually as an ethically challenged big-wig (Employee's Entrance {1933}; Skyscraper Souls {1932}). And there's no one better. Plus, he's good enough here to make even the flawed, albeit interesting, script well worth watching.

kidboots Constance Cummings was one of the most beautiful ingenues of the early thirties and the bonus was she could really act. "The Mind Reader" was typical of the Warner Bros. pre-coders, this one tackling the charlatans and phoney mediums that drifted through the country carnivals eager to con innocent folk out of their hard earned money. Warren Williams plays one of those who, along with his crooked buddies (Allan Jenkins and Clarence Muse) go from town to town - pulling teeth in Pine Bluff, selling hair tonic in Nashville but in Topeka they find a new racket and now, posing as "Chandra the Great - Mind Reader", he is out to "tell the chumps what they want to hear"!!Pretty Sylvia (Cummings) is one he advises "a great change will be coming into your life" - the next night she is employed as his secretary and it is her job to answer the hundreds of letters he receives from people begging him for advice. Things come crashing down when Jenny (Mayo Methot, in yet another dynamic performance), bursts in to tell him that his advice of rejecting the man she really loved wrecked both their lives!! Sylvia then realises that her husband (yes, she is now married to him) is a despicable fake and feels the only way their love can survive is for him to go straight.The second half of the movie sees him embracing a new racket, as selling brushes may be honest but financially unrewarding. A chance meeting with Jenkins, who is now a chauffeur to a cheating couple (Natalie Moorehead is the wife) sees Chandra become a very up-market spiritualist whose clients are happy to pay thousands to catch out their cheating spouses.Constance Cummings gave all her parts intelligence - even if it was there or not. By the mid 1930s she was being hailed as the next big emotional star but she had already secured life long happiness by marriage to Ben Levy and by the end of the thirties was happily living in England. In any other actress's hands Sylvia would have seemed a bit of a twit - blindly marrying him and then not realising he was the famous mind reader that the whole city was talking about (didn't she wonder where all the extra money was coming from)!!! There is a confrontation with an angry client in his office and he blows down to Mexico leaving Sylvia to bear the blame of the shooting. Warren William does what he does so well, playing a ruthless crook who, nevertheless, has sparks of redeeming qualities, enough so the ending isn't a surprise. One of the "conned" woman is Ruthelma Stevens, so good as the perfect secretary in "The Circus Queen Murder".

MartinHafer The idea of having Warren William play this part was an inspired choice--he was perfect for this part. However, no matter how interesting the idea was and how good William was, the plot just kind of fizzled--and late in the film the picture really lost its way. It's a shame, as the movie could have been very good.The film starts with William selling a variety of bogus products throughout the country. Eventually, he hits on the idea of becoming a fortune teller. He pretends to read the future but mostly just makes things up or has his assistant (Allan Jenkins) investigate and dig up information on people so he can appear psychic. After a while, he learns that a lot of people have been hurt or even killed because of his 'predictions'--culminating in a terrifically harrowing altercation with Mayo Methot (one-time wife of Humphrey Bogart). In the process, he ends up losing his wife--a woman who had thought William COULD predict the future but has since learned he was a phony.Now, at this point of the film, I really liked the movie. The scene with Methot was intense and wild. But, somehow, the great script with the sociopathic leading man lost its way...very badly. First, while William continues to hurt people again and again, even after he loses his wife, he eventually and completely out of the blue announces during one of his shows that he's a fake!! Why would such a selfish and despicable man do this?! People had already died because of him and he knew it--yet kept on lying and swindling people. So why later announce you are a fraud?! In addition, although William's wife (Constance Cummings) left him because he was such an evil man, why did she later in the film love him so unconditionally--even after she knew he had shot someone (and she had no idea whether it was premeditated or an accident)? And, why at the end of the film did William turn himself in to save Cummings when the police thought she was the killer?! This made zero sense--and the film just spiraled into an incomprehensible mess in every possible way.The movie is like a movie that began without a finished script. The first half was good but they just fudged the ending--and it sure looked bad! Pathetic and irritating, as the film had been so good in the first half--darn good.For a much better film about fake psychics, try watching "The Clairvoyant" (1934) with Claude Rains. While the plot is similar, what they do with the story in the second half is satisfying and worth seeing--"The Mind Reader" isn't!

mukava991 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.