The Clairvoyant

My Dad bought me a LOT of films at Christmas, and I started trying to make a dent on them last weekend by watching The Clairvoyant (normally if anyone says 'The Clairvoyant  to me I think of this). A lot of the films I watch are the ones I missed at the cinema recently; The Clairvoyant is about as far from that as possible, having been released in 1935 and starring Claude Rains (who has been died 10 years before I was even born). Rains is most famous for his role as the captain of the local police in Casablanca, but a quick check of his imdb entry reveals that he was in so much more at and around the time.

Here he plays Maximo, a man who earns a living by playing the part of a telepath on the theatre circuit. He and his wife Rene have a well-rehearsed routine in which they convince a crowd of people that he is able to work out what personal items she has taken from the crowd, despite being blindfolded. It is a trick of course, but during one show Maximo appears to enter a sort of trance state when staring at a beautiful woman in the crowd. While in this state he makes a prediction about a train crash, a prediction that comes true. Soon Maximo is national news, more so when he successfully predicts a 100 to 1 outsider to win the Derby. But he can only make predictions in the presence of the beautiful Christine. Maximo soon realises that this power is more curse than blessing, as not only is the weight of the world on his shoulders to make predictions, but Rene's jealousy towards Christine risks tearing his marriage apart.

The Clairvoyant suffers in front of a modern audience from being made at a time before Citizen Kane when movies looked very stagey, plus the footage seems to have become a little bedraggled before its conversion to digital format. It is difficult these days to work out how impressive a film like this would have looked to a 1930s audience. Was the explosion that happens towards the end of the film an impressive special effect back then or not? So I'm not going to comment on such matters with my 21st century brain. In terms of the story, I thought it was a shame that the ending shied away from becoming a full-on episode of the Twilight Zone. That's hardly too much of a criticism though since the Twilight Zone was still 20 years in the future when this was made. Aside from these minor points the film is a solid piece of storytelling starring one of the great actors of classic cinema.