Out west with Keir Dullea

Tomorrow, August 21, on TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a day of films devoted to actress Marie Windsor. While Windsor got big showy roles in movies like The Narrow Margin (8:00 PM), some of the movies presented have Windsor in rather smaller roles. One example of this is Mail Order Bride, which you can catch at 4:45 PM.

The movie opens up in Montana, with Will Lane (Buddy Ebsen) camping out along a creek on his way to the town of Congress. A stranger (Keir Dullea) shows up and treats Will like dirt but gets his comeuppance by not recognizing a drop-off in the riverbed. Both men make their way to Congress.

In Congress, Will stops by the grave of a Mr. Carey. It seems that the two were old friends, and when the elder Mr. Carey died, he left his ranch to Will but with strings attached. Those strings were that Carey had a son name Lee who really should inherit the ranch, but isn't yet a responsible enough man to run it. Will should serve as some sort of trustee to see that Lee becomes that responsible man at which point Will is to handle the ranch over to Lee.

It doesn't take much to figure out that Lee is in fact the stranger Will met in the opening; nor does it take much to see how irresponsible Lee is, as he gets drunk, cavorts with the women at the local house of ill repute, and loses his money and cattle playing poker against alleged friend Jace (Warren Oates). Will finds Lee at one such poker game, and after the fight that breaks out, Will takes Lee home. Lee, as you might guess, is none too pleased about finding out the terms of his father's will since Lee understandably expected to be inheriting the ranch.

Will realizes that Lee needs a wife who can tame him, along with the responsibility being a husband should bring to Will. To that end, Will sets off for the nearest big city, Kansas City, to find a suitable wife from the women who have been writing to the mail-order agencies. The gives the opportunity for a bit of humor with Kathleen Freeman playing a Salvation Army missionary, with Marie Windsor getting her one scene that also is some obvious foreshadowing for what the coda at the end of the movie is going to be. Windsor plays saloonkeeper Hanna, who isn't right for Lee. But Hanna has an employee who has no prospects and is in need of a husband, so offers that woman, Annie Boley (Lois Nettleton), up to go off to Montana and marry Lee sight unseen.

Now Annie, as it turns out, also has a son from a previous marriage (played by Jerry Mathers' kid brother). If Lee isn't exactly thrilled at the prospect of having a forced bride, he's definitely not going to be happy about becoming a stepfather. Annie isn't particularly thrilled herself, although she's a bit more willing to make a go of it. Lee's plan is to fake it until Will signs the deed to the ranch over to him, and then allow Annie and the kid to have their freedom.

Once again, you might guess that things aren't going to turn out that way. That's because Jace is still in the background, trying to figure out a way to get the rest of the cattle from the ranch. They're no longer Lee's to lose in a poker game, and Jace has absolutely no respect for Will. But this is also the sort of movie that's going to have a requisite happy ending, never mind the fact that the Code hadn't been completely destroyed yet.

Mail Order Bride is a little movie that isn't exactly great, but it's also certainly not bad. It feels like a predictable story where you know where everything is going to go by the last reel, but it's pleasant enough getting there. Keir Dullea isn't exactly the sort of person you'd expect to see in a western, or at least wasn't whom I expected to see in a western. This also isn't nearly as comedic as you might thing. But it's good enough to pass the time with.

Briefs for August 19-20, 2026

I suppose the first thing I should do is mention the passing of director Mark Rydell, who died last Thursday at the age of 97. He directed On Golden Pond, which I saw ages ago but have not done a post on according to a search of the blog, which means I must have seen it before I started blogging. I came across the end of Bette Midler's The Rose ages ago on the old Fox Movie Channel, I think again before I started blogging, and haven't found it since. However, looking at the list of Rydell movies, it turns out that I do have one of his films in my list of films to blog about, Harry and Walter Go to New York which aired on TCM for Diane Keaton's day. So that will be scheduled for sometime in September.

I just noticed recently that I've been misspelling "Paul Henreid" for years as "Henried", which might explain why searches for him haven't shown everything on my blog, and why the tags are a bit screwy. So I've been going through the archive of old posts and changing the tags, although the actual posts themselves are a bit more of a pain to change.

Also having died recently is actress Peggy Webber, who appeared in Orson Welles' adaptation of Macbeth as well as driving the plot of Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man. Webber was 100 when she died on Saturday.

In news of the odd, apparently grifting Meghan Markle produced a documentary on Girl Scout cookies. The interesting thing isn't that it bombed at the box office per se, but that accodring to the article it was beaten by a movie called CatVideoFest 2026. Not only that, but CatVideoFest has been going on for a decade. Then again, I'm also not in an area that would get it in its limited theatrical run.

Hattie McDaniel is being honored today in Summer Under the Stars, which means another showing of the 1936 version of Show Boat (2:00 AM overnight) which I had on my DVR from the last TCM showing but didn't get around to watching. That will be followed tomorrow by Marlon Brando. I don't think I've actually watched his version of Mutiny on the Bounty (1:00 PM) in its entirety before. There's also The Nightcomers (August 21, 2:15 AM), which I know I hadn't heard of before seeing it show up on the TCM schedule.

The Last Station

I mentioned last August when Christopher Plummer got a day in Summer Under the Stars that I was interested in the movie The Last Station because of its subject matter. Naturally I recorded it, but having recorded so many of Plummer's movies, I had to space out watching them since I didn't want to put up a bunch of posts on one star's movies in close proximity if I could avoid it.

Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) was one of the best-known writers of the second half of the 19th century, writing from his estate in the country south of Moscow. However, he had some rather idiosyncratic ideas on Christianity that displeased the Orthodox Church as well as the Tsar. On the other hand, those views gained a modest but extremely devoted following to the point that there was a Tolstoyan colony on some lands near Tolstoy's estate. As the movie opens, it's 1910 and Tolstoy is past 80, so there's naturally some thought being given to what's going to happen after he dies. He's got a devoted wife of many years, Sofya (Helen Mirren), and a couple of adult children. Sofya wants to ensure that she and the family will be looked after financially after Leo dies.

Meanwhile, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) heads the Tolstoyan organization in Moscow. It's something that comes with some political risk and he feels like he's being watched by the authorities. But he's also worried about what's going on down at the Tolstoyan estate. He and the other Tolstoyans feel that, in conjunction with Tolstoy's stated beliefs, the copyrights to Leo's works ought to go into the public domain after he dies. He's trying to get Leo to sign a new will that will do just this, while Sofya is understandably concerned that such a will not be signed. Chertkov, in order to see that his interests are seen to, and wanting to know exactly what Sofya is up to, sends a new secretary, young Valentin (James McAvoy) down to the estate partly as personal secretary and partly as a sort of spy.

Valentin finds a, shall we say, interesting situation that's not quite like the family in You Can't Take It With You, but something that's not too far off. There's that farming commune, while there are all sorts of hangers-on at the actual estate. And a lot of them want to get in Leo's good graces, in part by showing just how Tolstoyan they are, in a belief system that supposedly requires chastity. Valentin does the same thing, although as time goes on he begins to develop quite a bit of sympathy toward Sofya. Meanwhile, one of the working girls, Masha (Kerry Condon), whom you might think is almost a sort of groupie, decides to seduce Valentin: these Tolstoyans apparently need to learn about sex.

As the dispute over whether a new will is going to be signed rages on, we also learn that the marriage between Leo and Sofya is hitting a rough patch. That's partly because of Leo's advanced age; familiarity breeds contempt and all that. There's also Sofya's understandable feelings that Leo isn't looking after her. And with as busy as the estate is, matters are bound to come to a head, and sooner rather than later.

Now, you may not know this bit of history if you didn't study Russian in college like I did, but the end of Tolstoy's life involved him basically getting sick of it all and literally running away from home. However, he wasn't able to run too far as the strain of this resulted in his final illness and death in a country train station, with a bunch of assembled press holding vigil since Tolstoy was after all a prominent celebrity.

The Last Station is a movie looking at something that I don't think has gotten much attention in English-language cinema, although Tolstoy's works themselves obviously have. The movie gets high marks on all of the technical aspects, although filming was done with eastern Germany standing in for Russia. Plummer and Mirren both take the roles they're given and play them for all they're worth, which means extremely showy. I, however, was left at the end wondering why anybody became a Tolstoyan in the first place.

War Hunt

When Robert Redford died last year, TCM responded with one of their 24-hour programming tributes. This gave them a chance to show a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Redford's first big role (he gets an "introducing" credit), in a modest Korean War movie called War Hunt. It's getting an airing tomorrow, August 18, at 6:00 AM as part of Redford's day in Summer Under the Stars, so now is the time to schedule it.

As the movie opens, it's May 1953 in Korea, which means that the Korean War is about to end, or at least the fighting, not that the men on the ground doing that actual fighting know that it's about to end. The negotiations have been going on for ages and they grouse about it. Pvt. Roy Loomis (Robert Redford) is a man fresh out of boot camp who's been shipped over to Korea, and from there to a platoon that's pretty close to the front line, under Captain Pratt (Charles Aidman). Among Loomis' fellow soldiers are a couple of people who would go on to have well-known careers: Sgt. Van Horn (Sydney Pollack), Pvt. Crotty (Gavin MacLeod), and Sgt. Showalter (Tom Skerritt).

But the one guy everybody gives a wide berth to is Pvt. Ray Endore (John Saxon). The only person who doesn't give Endore that wide berth is young Charlie, a Korean orphan who was rescued by Pvt. Endore and now serves as Endore's private aide. Well, Pvt. Loomis doesn't really avoid Endore either, largely because he's new here and doesn't know yet just what Endore is like. The other guys in the outfit certainly try to warn Loomis.

And then one morning Endore returns to camp and wakes up Loomis with his whistling. He's also got a face covered in military-black of the sort used on a night operation when you don't want to be seen in the moonlight. Endore goes out on night patrols by himself, technically AWOL, because Capt. Pratt knows that Endore is able to get good intelligence information. The negatives, especially the big one that Endore likes to knife North Koreans to death, are things that Pratt overlooks because it's war, and war is hell and all that.

Loomis, again being new to all this, doesn't get any of it, and is concerned about the influence all of this is going to have on poor little Charlie. It's bad enough that Charlie has had the horrors of war visited upon him at such a young age; worse is that he's learning all the wrong lessons from a soldier who's showing himself to be increasingly mentally unstable. When Loomis brings up the point about what's going to happen to Charlie after the war, Endore thinks he's going to be able to stay in Korea after the hostilities end and continue to fight his own war.

And then the armistice does get signed, which means that the following night, everybody who's right at the front line with that little bit of demilitarized zone between them, is going to have to be on their best behavior. That's not something that Endore is going to like, and you can guess what he does when the sun goes down and the panic that this engenders in the other guys in his outfit.

War Hunt is a very modest, low-budget affair that somewhat surprisingly got extremely positive reviews back when it was released. It's not that I didn't like it or anything; it's more that the low-budget nature of the movie definitely reveals some of its flaws. Redford and Saxon both do good jobs with their roles, but everyone else is more or less a stock character. Perhaps it's the fact that in 1962, when the movie was released, this side of war was very little seen on screen. The heroic side is what most of the war movies delivered.

What a Woman!

Tomorrow, August 17, is given over to the films of Rosalind Russell as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars. If I had known this ahead of time, I would have scheduled my post on Roughly Speaking to show up here, since it's airing at 4:15 PM. Instead, I'll post about another of Russell's films that TCM aired around the same time as the last showing of Roughly Speaking but is not getting an airing during Summer Under the Stars: What a Woman!.

The movie opens with the great success of a novel called Whirlwind, a notoriously steamy and scandalous historical romance novel written by an author named Anthony Street. At least, that's the author's pen name; Street doesn't want anyone to know his real identity for professional reasons. At Knickerbocker magazine, they want to cash in on the success of Whirlwind, but there isn't any way they can possibly get an interview with Anthony Street. So the next best thing is decided, which is to write about something and someone tangentially related to Whirlwind.

The book has been optioned for a movie, and Carol Ainsley (Rosalind Rusell) is the agent who has been doing the liaison work between the publisher and the studio to make certain the adaptation goes off well and is a success for all involved. Knickerbocker magazine sends one of their reporters, Henry Pepper (Brian Aherne) to get an interview with Ainsley and do a puff piece on her which really ought to be good publicity for her as well as everybody involved with the adaptation. There is, however, a snag with that adaptation: Hollywood feels it can't find anybody currently in Hollywood who's suitable to play the part of the male lead.

Carol, as the woman who's the go-between between Hollywood and the publisher, so technically also the writer, has access to information on who the real Anthony Street is, although she's supposed to avoid using it if at all possible. But she feels she has to, and she finds out that Anthony Street is actually a professor at Buxton College, one of those small liberal arts colleges that populated Hollywood movies of the era. Carol sets off for Buxton, PA. Henry, who by now is acting a lot like the Melvyn Douglas character in Theodora Goes Wild, gets wind of Carol's travels and follows Carol to Pennsylvania and starts acting obnoxious enough that you wonder why anybody would like him.

As for "Anthony Street, he's really college professor Michael Cobb (Willard Parker), who teaches a course on Elizabethan literature and most definitely doesn't want it known that he wrote the novel. Indeed, his boss is shocked and not entirely happy to find it out. Worse, Carol realizes that Cobb based the physical description of the male lead on himself, and that he would be the perfect person to play that character in the movie, which one supposes would also make a great human interest story. Carol convinces Cobb to come to New York with her and make preparations to train in acting.

Meanwhile, Cobb acts like he's falling in love with Carol, which further complicates the story and sends it to a place where it really starts to lose steam, unfortunately. Cobb, as it turns out, isn't much of an actor, but by now there's too much invested in the movie for him to back out. Henry is still around, continuing to be an obnoxious snoop. Cobb pursues Carol even though she's not certain she wants to marry him, never having been the marrying kind. Eventually the movie gets to the Washington, DC, mansion of Carol's senator father for the finale, which is another plot twist that makes the movie lose steam.

I didn't exactly hate What a Woman!, but it's definitely a movie that's got its fair share of script issues. It was released in late 1943, so at the height of World War II. I can imagine audiences of the day wanting the sort of romantic escapism the movie provides. Eighty years on, however, the characters are a bit too unrealistic for any of this to work well. Besides, everything could have been handled with a Zoom chat and Carol would have been able to prevent Henry find finding out the author's real identity.

Nazi Heist Plot Movie #59486748578267

I mentioned some time back that TCM ran a double feature of movies starring Telly Savalas. The first one, which I already did a post on, was Crooks and Coronets. The second was Inside Out, and now is the time for the post on that movie.

The movie starts off with a prologue set in 1945, the dying days of the Nazi German regime, if you didn't figure that out from the title of the post. A bunch of Nazis are transporting cargo, when they're stopped at a checkpoint. Except that the checkpoint is a ruse for SS agents to shoot the people driving the truck, and take it to a train depot. There, they commandeer one of the trains for, well....

Cut to London in the present day, or, well, 1975 when the movie is set. Harry Morgan (Telly Savalas), is a former US Army officer who served in World War II but has fallen on a bit of hard times, making a living doing scammy things but not enough of a living to keep himself out of debt. He gets a letter from a German he knew, Ernst Furben (James Mason), who meets him to propose a business deal. Apparently, Ernst knows that that train we saw in the opening was supposed to transport looted Nazi gold to the Balkans but never made it there (didn't we see something like this in Charade?) -- the gold just disappeared as far as everyone knows.

Ah, but Ernst knows a way to find out where that gold is. Apparently, the man in charge of the shipment is notorious Nazi prisoner Reinhardt Holtz (Wolfgang Lukschy), who is an obvious stand-in for Rudolf Hess. Holtz is being kept as the only prisoner in a prison co-run by the British, Americans, and Soviets on a rotation basis, which is part of where Morgan comes in. Morgan served in the war with MSgt. Prior (Aldo Ray), who never rose far in the military but is a career officer, is the American who is in charge of day-to-day operations when it's the Americans' turn to oversee the prison. Since Prior and Harry knew each other, perhaps Harry can corrupt Prior to get people into the prison who can get the information out of Holtz as to where that gold really ended up. As if the gold is still where it was 30 years earlier.

Now, at this point, we get the standard second act of a heist movie which involves the protagonist organizing all the other people who are going to be in on the heist. This involves master thief Sly Wells (Robert Culp), currently based in Amsterdam, as well as several Germans. They're able to blackmail the doctor who is the one person who gets to see Holtz on a daily basis, with the plot ultimately being that they're going to drug Holtz, kidnap him, and replace him for a day with the doctor. While under the influence of those drugs, 36 Hours-style, they'll get Holtz to reveal the location of the gold.

Amazingly, this part of the plot goes off without much of a hitch. But when Holtz tells them where the gold is (they're dressed like Nazis and he doesn't realize they're not real Nazis), they discover that the location is in what is now East Berlin. Oops. Good luck getting behind Communist lines. And better luck getting the gold back to West Berlin and then out of West Germany.

Frankly, the heist plot in Inside Out is ridiculous and something that would never work in real life. But this is a movie, and thanks to a cast of professionals who look like they're enjoying themselves, they turn Inside Out into something that's at least 90 minutes of passable entertainment. That is, at least as long as you can suspend disbelief.

Youngblood Hawke

I've always enjoyed the potboilers of the 1950s and 1960s. Even if they weren't particularly good, they're interesting, and some of them can be fun. One that's a fairly minor entry in the cycle is Youngblood Hawke.

James Franciscus stars as Arthur Youngblood Hawke, who as the movie opens is driving a coal truck in his home town in Kentucky and convinced that somebody is trespassing on the family land. He gets home and tells his mother Sarah (Mildred Dunnock) about this, and she's even more ticked about it. It seems that some years earlier, before Dad died, Dad's brothers dishonestly got the mineral rights on Dad's land, which is why they're rich and she and Youngblood isn't. She could use a good lawyer, and Youngblood could have been one, except that he decided to go to college to study creative writing in hopes of starting a writing career.

And then Youngblood gets a letter in the mail telling him that a publishing house in New York liked his manuscript and is thinking about publishing it, even though he submitted it unsolicited without an agent, which seems like a very bad idea. But in any case Youngblood goes to New York and gets treated like royalty by the publisher Jason Prince (Lee Bowman), who read the book along with his wife Fannie (Eva Gabor). If Youngblood signs the contract, he'll be working with editor Jeanne Green (Suzanne Pleshette). Youngblood wants more than the "standard" advance for a first-time writer, since he's been busy working on his second novel. A compromise is reached where that extra money is to be paid out in several monthly installments. Jeanne gets Youngblood a place one floor above her in her apartment building, and she proceeds to fall in love with him.

It's the first love in an exceedingly complicated life for Youngblood. At a Christmas party, he's introduecd to wealthy Frieda Winter (Geneviève Page), who loves studly young Youngblood albeit with the catch that she got her wealth by marrying a wealthy man (Kent Smith). She does things like secure Youngblood the use of a clients swanky Manhattan apartment while the client goes out to Hollywood to make a movie, something that ticks off Jeanne. Jeanne, for her part, has been thinking about going to another publishing company.

Where Youngblood's first book was at most a modest success, his second book is a big hit, and starts to give him a swollen head. Youngblood is approached by aging actress Irene Perry (Mary Astor) who wants him to adapt the first novel into a stage play with her as the lead actress. He also gets the idea of "investing" his money in various ways, including building out on Long Island along with starting his own publishing company. But this gets him into debt, and those debts are eventually going to be called in.

Youngblood is told, much like Fyodor Dostoevsky when he wrote The Gambler, that he has to deliver his next book by a certain time or else contractual clauses are going to leave him in a very bad state. Youngblood works himself into a very parlous state, while all his romantic relationships resolve themselves to varying degrees of satisfaction.

I called Youngblood Hawke a minor entry in the potboiler cycle largely because it's both not particularly good and not memorably bad. It's just there, as it were, and lingers on for over 130 minutes. Everybody does well enough with the material they're given; it's more that it's not very good material. Poor Suzanne Pleshette is used, and the whole mining rights subplot is never really examined as much as it should be.

Sweet Rosie O'Grady

Last year at Thanksgiving, Dave Karger sat down with comedy legend Carol Burnett to present some of her favorite movies, paired with the parodies that Burnett and her friends did on her weekly variety show in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One parody was The Doily Sisters, which if you know your old movies parodies The Dolly Sisters, a movie I wrote about back in 2017. Unfortunately, TCM couldn't work out the rights to that movie for some reason, so they obtained a different Betty Grable musical for Dave and Carol to talk about: Sweet Rosie O'Grady.

Grable plays Madeleine Marlowe, an American who's the hit of the London stage in the 1880s. She's about to head back to America to appear in her next musical. She's also had men pursuing her, especially Charles, the Duke of Trippingham (Reginald Gardiner). For various reasons, they're not getting married in England, and they're also not traveling back to America together. Madeleine will be going to America with her dresser Edna (Virginia Grey), while the Duke is going to be following in about a month. They'll get married and live happily ever after....

Yeah, right, since all of this is happening in the opening reel. Over in America, there's a scandal sheet called the Police Gazette, edited by Tom Moran (Adolphe Menjou). His best writer, Sam McGee (Robert Young), has heard rumors of Marlowe's past here in New York before she went off to London and became big star Madeleine Marlowe. It seems that Marlowe is a stage name for a "Rosie O'Grady" who worked in the sort of theater that wasn't considered so respectable to the London audiences that flocked to Marlowe shows, making Marlowe the sort of woman a duke might not want to marry. Worse, when Marlowe gets off the boat in New York, she's tricked into getting in a carriage with McGee, who uses this ruse as a way of getting an even more scandalous interview.

Rosie, as I'll call her for the rest of the post, is unhappy. But she's also not stupid. So she decides she's going to turn the tables on McGee by starting a publicity campaign to get everybody to believe that she and McGee are actually carrying on a romance together, which is something that McGee doesn't really want. And even though the intention is that this be a fake romance, the Duke gets all the news when he gets to America, so he's not quite so happy himself and decides that he'll get together with McGee to try to turn the tables back on Rosie again.

Complications ensue, but considering who's got the top two billing spots, you can figure out where things are going to go. (Hint: Rosie does not end up with Moran.) Then again, you also might have been able to figure it out if you've seen other classic movies. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is a remake of a Loretta Young movie called Love Is News. There's also a third version of the story, That Wonderful Urge, which I have apparently not done a post on yet.

The obvious difference with Sweet Rosie O'Grady is that, as a vehicle for Betty Grable, it's got extra musical numbers, most of which are presented as numbers for her stage actress character to perform in her various stage shows. The plot works well enough again, and Grable does fine with her musical numbers even if those aren't quite so necessary to the plot. Sweet Rosie O'Grady is also in Technicolor, and the print Fox ran was quite good. Somewhat surprising for a Grable movie is that the running time isn't padded out by the presence of those musical numbers. IMDb lists the running time as shorter than Love Is News, which wasn't a long movie to begin with.

Two interesting FXM schedule notes

I was looking at the FXM schedule, for Friday, August 14, and saw two things worth mentioning. First is that FXM decided to run an entire block of Gene Tierney movies:

8:00 AM Laura
9:30 AM Leave Her to Heaven
11:25 AM Black Widow

I have to admit that I don't think I've seen Black Widow on the FXM schedule in a while. It's the least of the three movies, although that's partly because of how good Laura and Leave Her to Heaven are.

The other interesting thing is the double-bill that follows Black Widow:

1:05 PM Nightmare Alley (1947)
3:00 PM Nightmare Alley (2021)

I'll admit right up front to not having seen the 2021 version, since I don't go to the movie theater often becuase my local sixtyplex is in a dead mall and a terribly depressing place to go to. Besides, that version would have come out at the height of the covid masking idiocy. I didn't want to get panic attacks from not being able to have the mask under my nose. I was out in the woods with my since-deceased dog who, being on a retractable leash, served as my social distancing. Still I has some assholes who pointedly moved away because I was outside, without a mask, when the nonsense guidance even said no mask was needed since I wasn't going to be close enough to these other people.

No, I'm not sorry for the rant. I'll just go back and keep watching old movies.

No pizza in this one

Another silent movie that I had to make a point of watching before it expired from my DVR was Tod Browning's The Mystic, which had a copyright date of 1925 but looked like a re-release print considering that it had what really seemed like a synchronized score. (Then again, it's possible that a new score was commissioned for a video release, although there's no modern title card mentioning this.) In any case, as I always do, I made it point to watch it before it expired so that I could write up this post on the movie.

The Mystic opens in Hungary, at a traveling circus where one of the acts is a young woman named Zara (Aileen Pringle) who is part magic act, part phony psychic, working with her father Zazarack (Mitchell Lewis) and knife-thrower Anton. The show goes from village to village (although there are some surprisingly large building from the MGM backlot in this village) with the act traveling in the 1920s equivalent of a motor home. In this village however, someone who's clearly out of place has shown up and seems to be stalking Zara. Dad and Anton are worried, although Zara doesn't seem to care.

That man turns out to be an American, Michael Nash (Conway Tearle, half-brother of Godfrey). While the magic act is a small-time phony thing and presumably everybody in the village knows it, Michael is a much bigger would-be con artist. He has an idea that would fleece people out of large sums of money, but he needs a phony psychic like Zara to pull it off. He's willing to offer everyone in the act a substantial sum of money to come to America, where they'll engage in the con that Michael has planned.

But first, they need to engage in a smaller con to get the higher society of New York to believe that Zara is really what they claim she is, and this is one of the best parts of the movie, as we see all the preparations Michael goes to to make the effects of the séance seem real. There's a way for him to eavesdrop on the room, and a baseboard panel that allows someone to get into the room where the séance is being held even though the doors are supposedly locked. Even though a police inspector (character actor DeWitt Jennings) shows up with the express intention of debunking things, he's not able too and things go off well enough for the con artists.

Well enough, in fact, that they get the impression of wealthy heiress Doris Merrick and her guardian Bradshaw who is managing the trust that holds Doris' wealth. Michael's plan is to gain Doris' confidence so that he can get the bonds and other securities that comprise Doris' wealth. But things don't go quite as planned for a bunch of reasons, in part because with all that money there's bound to be jealousy over who gets how much, and in part because the authorities are on the case. Several guns are involved, and there's also Anton's prowess at knife-throwing that's finally a useful part of the plot.

Tod Browning's movies are always interesting for how shocking they try to be. Unfortunately, The Mystic is hampered by a Hollywood ending that I can't help but think wasn't Browning's idea but that of somebody at MGM. The story up until the climax works fairly well, with the best part being the special effects, and the way we more or less get to see how they were created because the creation of those effects is an important plot point. Despite the flaws, The Mystic is still a movie that's worth a watch.