Miss Cleo

TCM is showing a pair of movies about psychics tomorrow morning. Neither has been released to DVD, as far as I'm aware, and they don't show up on TCM very often. I was going to write up a full post on one or the other of them, but with Peter Graves' sudden death and finding out about the interesting short airing early this evening, I don't have so much time.

The first of the movies is 1933's The Mind-Reader, at 8:45 AM ET tomorrow. Warren William plays the phony psychic here, working the carnival scene until he meets a woman who insists he go straight. He does so for love, but when regular work can't pay the bills, he has to go back to the con game, which winds up having disastrous consequences....

It's followed at 10:00 AM by The Clairvoyant. Claude Rains plays the title role in this 1934 British movie, that of a magician-type mindreader doing his tricks at a music hall with his female partner. However, he meets a woman who has a strange effect on him, that of making him actually able to see the future. Not that anybody believes him, of course. When he predicts a disaster that does happen, he's suspected of having deliberately caused that disaster in ordre to have his predictions seen as coming true.

The Clairvoyant has aired once or twice since I've started blogging, although I never got around to posting on it. However, I don't think The Mind-Reader has aired since Stephen Sondheim was TCM's Guest Programmer, which was back in March, 2005.