Constance Cummings was one of the most beautiful ingenues of the early thirties and the bonus was she could really act. "The Mind Reader" was typical of the Warner Bros. pre-coders, this one tackling the charlatans and phoney mediums that drifted through the country carnivals eager to con innocent folk out of their hard earned money. Warren Williams plays one of those who, along with his crooked buddies (Allan Jenkins and Clarence Muse) go from town to town - pulling teeth in Pine Bluff, selling hair tonic in Nashville but in Topeka they find a new racket and now, posing as "Chandra the Great - Mind Reader", he is out to "tell the chumps what they want to hear"!!
Pretty Sylvia (Cummings) is one he advises "a great change will be coming into your life" - the next night she is employed as his secretary and it is her job to answer the hundreds of letters he receives from people begging him for advice. Things come crashing down when Jenny (Mayo Methot, in yet another dynamic performance), bursts in to tell him that his advice of rejecting the man she really loved wrecked both their lives!! Sylvia then realises that her husband (yes, she is now married to him) is a despicable fake and feels the only way their love can survive is for him to go straight.
The second half of the movie sees him embracing a new racket, as selling brushes may be honest but financially unrewarding. A chance meeting with Jenkins, who is now a chauffeur to a cheating couple (Natalie Moorehead is the wife) sees Chandra become a very up-market spiritualist whose clients are happy to pay thousands to catch out their cheating spouses.
Constance Cummings gave all her parts intelligence - even if it was there or not. By the mid 1930s she was being hailed as the next big emotional star but she had already secured life long happiness by marriage to Ben Levy and by the end of the thirties was happily living in England. In any other actress's hands Sylvia would have seemed a bit of a twit - blindly marrying him and then not realising he was the famous mind reader that the whole city was talking about (didn't she wonder where all the extra money was coming from)!!! There is a confrontation with an angry client in his office and he blows down to Mexico leaving Sylvia to bear the blame of the shooting. Warren William does what he does so well, playing a ruthless crook who, nevertheless, has sparks of redeeming qualities, enough so the ending isn't a surprise. One of the "conned" woman is Ruthelma Stevens, so good as the perfect secretary in "The Circus Queen Murder".
Pretty Sylvia (Cummings) is one he advises "a great change will be coming into your life" - the next night she is employed as his secretary and it is her job to answer the hundreds of letters he receives from people begging him for advice. Things come crashing down when Jenny (Mayo Methot, in yet another dynamic performance), bursts in to tell him that his advice of rejecting the man she really loved wrecked both their lives!! Sylvia then realises that her husband (yes, she is now married to him) is a despicable fake and feels the only way their love can survive is for him to go straight.
The second half of the movie sees him embracing a new racket, as selling brushes may be honest but financially unrewarding. A chance meeting with Jenkins, who is now a chauffeur to a cheating couple (Natalie Moorehead is the wife) sees Chandra become a very up-market spiritualist whose clients are happy to pay thousands to catch out their cheating spouses.
Constance Cummings gave all her parts intelligence - even if it was there or not. By the mid 1930s she was being hailed as the next big emotional star but she had already secured life long happiness by marriage to Ben Levy and by the end of the thirties was happily living in England. In any other actress's hands Sylvia would have seemed a bit of a twit - blindly marrying him and then not realising he was the famous mind reader that the whole city was talking about (didn't she wonder where all the extra money was coming from)!!! There is a confrontation with an angry client in his office and he blows down to Mexico leaving Sylvia to bear the blame of the shooting. Warren William does what he does so well, playing a ruthless crook who, nevertheless, has sparks of redeeming qualities, enough so the ending isn't a surprise. One of the "conned" woman is Ruthelma Stevens, so good as the perfect secretary in "The Circus Queen Murder".