(aka: The Spiritualist )
USA 1948
d: Bernard Vorhaus
Image Entertainment (Region 1 us)
sc: Muriel Roy Bolton, Ian McLellan Hunter (from a story by Crane Wilbur)
c: John Alton (b/w)
e: Norman Colbert
pd: Frank Durlauf
m: Alexander Laszlo
p: Benjamin Stoloff (Ben Stoloff Productions)
w: Turhan Bey, Lynn Bari, Cathy O'Donnell, Richard Carlson, Donald Curtis, Virginia Gregg
pr: 29 Jul 1948
rt: 77:59 min
dvd-rl: 18 Jul 2006
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: English Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: --
supp: --
This Eagle-Lion release, a short-lived low budget production company that grew out of PRC and into United Artists, was apparently considered too lowgrade to open in New York with a press screening, so there is no mention of it at all in the encyclopedic multi-volume reprint of the New York Times Film Reviews. However, Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg remembered it in their volume, "Hollywood In The Forties," and even gave John Alton a mention: "More spiritualistic jiggery-pokery figured in Bernard Vorhaus's The Amazing Mr. X (also known as The Spiritualist). Those two echt- Forties people, Turhan Bey and Lynn Bari, played respectively a phony medium and the supposed widow with whose 'departed' husband he claims he can communicate. Long before the days of transistor tape recorders and stereo, Bey was able to construct sonic miracles in his house and on a beach to give Miss Bari some unsettling aural illusions. Scarcely any of its 78 minutes were dull, and John Alton's decorative low-key black-and-white images were constantly watchable."
— PFA
