The Mind Reader (1933)

[sethb]

I just watched "The Mind Reader," a 1933 drama with Warren William, on Amazon Video. I wasn't fortunate or quick enough to pick it up when it was part of the "Forbidden Hollywood" DVD series.

But I also saw it on TCM before our cable company dropped TCM a few years ago, and I thought I remembered a sequence with William sitting with a bunch of hobos, doing his mindreading act with an empty whiskey bottle. However, that sequence did not appear in the Amazon Video print.

So the question is --- is my mind playing tricks on me, or was that sequence cut from Amazon's print for some reason? IMDb lists a running time of 70 minutes, and so does Amazon. I don't have the Forbidden Hollywood DVD, so I can't compare that version.

Can anyone shed some light on this for me? Thanks! SETH

[Salty Dog]

Is it possible you're confusing it with Nightmare Alley, which has a scene like that? It's an easy mistake to make, they have similar storylines. As a matter of fact, I showed a double bill of those 2 movies in a little film group I ran, called the program "Carny to Cult."

[sethb]

I think you've hit the nail on the head, and I believe you're right!

I also think that maybe I've watched WAY too many old movies! Although the story lines are actually very similar, Tyrone Power was much better-looking than Warren William. But Warren also had better diction than Tyrone did, for what that's worth.

Thanks for getting the reference right. SETH

[Frame Rate]

But I also saw it on TCM before our cable company dropped TCM a few years ago...

Hmm.... With most cable companies well equipped with the compression technology to offer hundreds of channels in dozens of package assortments, that's the first I've heard of TCM getting shut out completely. Then again, with "cord-cuttng" increasing every month (due to the ascendancy of a la carte web-streaming) the day may be fast approaching when cable-channel packages go the way of the VHS cassette and your local Blockbuster store -- and a lot of "niche channels," subsidized by their inclusion in those packages, will simply go dark.

Or is this already happening? Nevertheless, my cable provider still offers a subscription menu that easily fills a couple of hard-copy pages with multiple columns of very small type, and just to get TCM I've got to pay for quite a bit of never-watched esoterica.

[sethb]

Well, my wonderful cable company didn't exactly drop TCM. What they did was to delete TCM from their regular lineup --- where it was included at no extra charge -- and put it into a new optional $12/month "package" with ESPN.
They claimed that not enough people were watching TCM to warrant continuing it.

As we all know, lots of vintage movie fans are also rabid sports fans (?), so this new "package" made perfect sense to some programming moron -- or more likely, to some accountant. And the concept of paying extra to get something that had previously been completely free (or at least included in my $150/month cable bill) also endeared me once again to our local cable company, whose greed knows no bounds.

The entire episode reminded me of the illegal "block booking" practices that the major studio used to engage in. But what was a no-no for the movie industry is apparently OK for the cable companies! Hopefully, with the advent of streaming, more people will be "cutting the cord" and purchasing only the content they actually want to see, thus getting the ultimate revenge. We have already started down that road by getting Disney+, and since we already have Amazon Prime, there are a bunch of good flicks available there as well, including interesting stuff like Claude Rains in "The Clairvoyant" (1933) and "The Mind Reader." SETH

[Mike Gebert]

Consider Criterion Channel, which licenses a lot of older films besides its own classic foreign film collections. Between Criterion and what's either included or available inexpensively through Amazon, you don't strictly need TCM to feed an old movie jones. Alternately, you can get TCM and many other cable channels through Sling, and still probably save quite a bit versus whatever cable package you had.

[sethb]

Thanks, Mike, for the good advice! I will look into Criterion and Sling to feed my TCM needs.

I also have Amazon Prime and have been investigating some of the older films that are available through Prime. So far I've found that it's a interesting mix, with everything from Pre-Codes to a few silents, lots of noir, and plenty of Poverty Row producers like Monogram, PRC and so on.

The main problem is that the quality of the Amazon offerings ranges from excellent to horrible, and mostly tends towards fair and poor. Perhaps I've been spoiled by all of the recent restored movies on DVD and Blu-ray, but a fair amount of the Amazon material appears to be third, fourth or fifth generation dupes and very well-worn 16mm prints, with more splices in just one print than I saw in three entire years on the A-V squad in high school fifty years ago. SETH