Dorothy Davenport Reid--Sucker Money (1933)

Dorothy Davenport Reid directed this film as “Dorothy Reid,” with a co-director, Melville Shyer. A bare plot summary—and the subtitle, “An exposé of the psychic racket,”--give the impression that it is a clumsy perhaps lurid attempt at an exploitation film. That’s far from the truth.

There is no warning about the dangers lurking among the séance crowd and there is no straight-into-the-camera serious lecture about the average person’s gullibility delivered by a pipe-smoking professor or doctor sitting at a desk. The film does not pose as a documentary.  It is a crime melodrama, suspenseful and well-paced, and the acting is creditable on the part of Mischa Auer, as the villainous Swami Yomurda (yes, say that quickly), and Mae Busch as Mame, a worn and cynical member of the group of fakes and swindlers, who is not too far gone to sacrifice herself for the greater good.

Mae Busch (1923)
--Wikimedia Commons

Jimmy Reeves (Earl McCarty) is a young newspaper reporter and a former actor.  Because of this latter skill, his editor sends him undercover to get a job with a psychic who, the editor suspects, is a con artist. In his first day on the job, he falls for Clare Walton (Phyllis Barrington) whose well-to-do father is the target of the Swami’s fraud. The Swami’s traveling group of crooks goes from town to town bilking people out of their money. After much ado involving the hypnotizing and kidnapping of Clare and the payment of a ransom, the cops catch up with the Swami, though not before he kills two women, including Mame, and attempts to murder the group’s man on the outside, George Hunter (Al Bridge), who has befriended Mr. Walton and Clare. All comes right in the end, with the Swami dead and Clare and Jimmy united and headed for Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where Jimmy will take a job in banking. (Yes, there is something really funny in that level of specificity in 1933 during the Depression, but I digress…).

The plot is conventional in many ways but the persuasive acting of Mae Busch gives it a heart. Her role is of decent size and there are plenty of opportunities for her to offer a performance that ranges from nearly raging, desperate with an alcoholic thirst, to regretful, thoughtful and quietly tragic. When she is on the screen she is extraordinary. Her subtle acting is perfectly captured by the camera. She is usually photographed in medium shots, not close ups, so the acting has to be legible and convincing at that distance. I will certainly be keeping an eye out for her in future #52FilmsByWomen viewing.

If “traveling group of crooks” has you thinking “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” (with a nod to Cher) you might also think about a traveling troupe of actors and their ability to set up camp, put on a show that amazes and immerses the audience, then pull up stakes and move to another town and perform the same stunt for a new audience.

The subtext here, and it is possible to read it as intentional, is about actors and audience, the way an audience willingly gives itself up to the fantasy on the screen. About twenty minutes into the film, a spectacle (the “manifestation,” as the Swami calls it) is performed for Mr. Walton and others in fairly large audience.

The segment of the film from 17:44-24:53 is the first set of “manifestations.” There are three manifestations that are interrupted by cuts to the audience or to the changing room where Mame and Jimmy are getting ready for their performances, which are the second and third manifestations.

From the meta-cinematic perspective, the first manifestation is remarkable. As proof that the seer, Princess Karami, can see both the past and the future, the Swami draws aside curtains revealing what appears to be a screen or reflective surface. He announces that the seer will make scenes of the past “materialize upon the sacred onyx” and Karami herself follows this with, the scenes “will be inscribed forever upon the records of eternity.” Upon the “onyx” on screen we, situated behind and somewhat above the diegetic audience (see screenshot), watch a moving picture “materialize”; it shows the Waltons and the nefarious George walking along the street. The Waltons and George react with astonishment, recognizing that their actions from a previous day are being shown on the screen.

At the end of this first segment, the camera cuts to Mame and Jimmy behind the scenes. Previously, we non-diegetic viewers have watched them do their lighting tests and consider the proper poses to take. Now the players apply make-up and put on their wigs and costumes. We are privy to all of this including the skilled labor of the lighting specialist who works with some pretty fancy equipment; his hand is shown on two occasions pulling the lever of the dimmer. Here, he enters carrying the motion picture projector used for the onyx display and it’s explained by Mame to Jimmy. This is the equipment used to take advantage of the “saps,” as Mame calls them. The technical mechanisms of performance and performance itself are highlighted in the film. The Swami’s house is a space of performance and exhibition, even of spectacle.

Now to return to the moment of the first manifestation:

We, the non-diegetic audience, watch almost as members of the on-screen audience, and we unexpectedly see projected a scene that we have already viewed, but it is now at a further distance, within the film we are watching.  There is a film within the film, but it is disorienting because this is no ordinary film. This is an unsettling moment of the fantastic.

Questions immediately distracted and absorbed me:  I first accepted it as simply the repeating of a scene I had already viewed being shown again in a different context. I would call this extra-textual thinking on my part--“The film editor has just reused this segment of film.” But this thought was quickly overtaken by the question of how this film could exist. Who made it? Where were they when we were watching the Waltons ourselves?

The Waltons are the intended audience. The film means something only to them; the rest of the audience does not understand its significance. The Waltons realize they are viewing a scene they enacted unaware that they were performing for “the records of eternity.” George, that faker, even exclaims, “Great Scott, that is uncanny!” (19:54).

And indeed it is.
 

It is uncanny in one way for the Waltons, whose subjective experience is exhibited objectively from an unknown point of view; this is an uncanny repetition.  For the non-diegetic audience, me, for instance, it is doubly uncanny.  I was aware of watching them on film the first time they were shown on the street, but that’s what films do. The repetition of their performance (isn’t an element of the uncanny already present in any film experience?) at this remove made me question who had been filming over my shoulder, as I experienced their stroll filtered through my own subjectivity, never realizing that my experience was also being filmed.  And would be repeated in a new context.

I only wish there were some way to show all of those flashes of thought in there proper sequence and at the speed with which they occurred in my mind. I was so caught up in thinking about all of this, I don’t even recall what happened at the end of the scene. I was perfectly comfortable in my privileged spectatorship, quite cognizant that I knew it was all a stunt and that there were real actors involved, then I had to adjust to absorb this shock.  The experience was much more shocking and discomfiting than this makes it sound.

At the end of the first manifestation, the camera cuts to Mame and Jimmy. Mame explains the use of the motion picture camera and explains how the film of the Waltons was obtained. It turns out that the non-diegetic audience was shown the set-up but we can only understand it in retrospect. When the Waltons went for their walk with George, a truck, shown to us, follows them and films them. The Waltons are the stars of a movie they didn’t know they were in, one with a larger and darker plot than they realized.  George, who accompanied them, though, must have known they were all performing in a small, boring drama that would only gain significance when it was shown to the appropriate audience.

Later, a police detective who gets close to the “onyx” remarks, “I get the gag. Everything down below is reflected on the black glass.”

This was very satisfying viewing. The plot rolled on smoothly and was far more entertaining and comprehensible than that of A Woman Condemned, but the admirable complexity lay in the relationships among the performers, in the rich performance of Mae Busch, and in the sense that in the minds of the directors they were having their own little gag, giving their own “sacred onyx” some unanticipated depth, and making us (the “saps”?) look over our shoulders suspiciously for at least an anxious moment or two.

This film is available streaming through Amazon in the USA. That version is 59 minutes, while Pitts* lists it at 70 min. I wonder what happened in those additional 11 minutes?

*Pitts, Michael R. Poverty Row Studios, 1929-1940. Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2005.