Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Very interesting film. Was caught on the premise when seeing the trailer but unsure as to what the outcome would be for the showing. As it turns out, it was a very good film.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

The premise of Warren William as a "supernatural" con man, with the gorgeous Constance Cummings by his side, looks tantalizing on paper, but the script of "The Mind Reader" is not particularly well-thought-out. The continuity is abrupt, and the story raises all sorts of little questions, like why is Cummings asking for forgiveness (!) when she discovers William's trickery or how can the skeptic sheriff turn into a believer so easily or why do they arrest Cummings for murder with absolutely no evidence against her, and so on. Director Roy Del Ruth does his best with this script; the tilted camera angles are interesting to see. ** out of 4.

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.

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.

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.