The Mystic

A good Tod browning movie but without Lon Chaney. Anyway, the story sounds here quite strange and dark. Mystery and drama fans will be delighted by this story of a young eastern european woman hired to the new world. This one is quite rare on TV, so if you can don't miss it !

A trio of gypsies notice an American, Michael Nash (Conway Tearle), staring at them. When Nash comes stalking around the wagon of the gypsy Zara one night, the other gypsies use this opportunity to get the drop on him and ask him what he's up to. He's a con man from the US who wants to enlist the gypsies in his latest scam. He takes them from Hungary to America. There they set up shop as a group of mystics with the woman, Zara (Aileen Pringle) as the actual psychic.

When they first arrive in the US the police show up to see if they can catch them being fakes. The police try several stunts, but the act doesn't miss a beat. This is also an opportunity for the movie audience to see how the con operates.

Then Nash gets the object of the con he's wanted all along - Doris Merrick. She's a very wealthy and rather innocent young woman who was orphaned and has been entrusted to a guardian. Her guardian has been embezzling from her estate to so as to cover his losses on Wall Street. Nash gets them both to believe that the spirit of Doris's father knows about this and wants Doris to demand her assets be taken from the custody of her guardian. Once Doris has these assets Nash and the gypsies plan to steal her wealth and leave her flat.

Doris's authenticity and belief in him suddenly causes Nash some unexpected misgivings on robbing her blind. Zara suspects that there is more to her and Nash than him being her self-appointed personal protector, and the old green eyed monster rears its ugly head. Complications ensue.

The film has an ending that doesn't really fit that has all of the hallmarks of an MGM poll tested happy ending that doesn't make sense from the story's point of view but was probably something that test audiences said that they wanted to see.

Conway Tearle, if you've seen him in some of his early talking appearances when he still had leading man status, seems quite bland to have the part of the hero. I guess it helped that he had a leading role in "Gold Diggers of Broadway" (1929) which made more money for Warner Bros. Than any other film until Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938.

Leading ladies Aileen Pringle (Zara) and Gladys Hulette (Doris) both lived well into their 90s, although acting had passed them by early in the sound film era.

Michael Nash is the corrupt guardian of heiress Doris Merrick after the death of her father. He wants to steal her entire fortune. He hires Hungarian gypsy Zara to fake seances back in New York. Instead, she and her cohorts have other plans.

Director Tod Browning was unable to get his usual collaborator Lon Chaney and this became one of his lesser known films. It is missing that something to push this over the top. Nevertheless, I am taken with this premise and I find the story intriguing.

...well, not quite, but the main reason to see this film today is for Tod Browning completists. His fingerprints are all over "The Mystic". He developed the scenario and Waldemar Young wrote the screenplay. These two worked together at MGM throughout the second half of the 1920s, and almost exclusively with Lon Chaney. I say almost because this is one of only two silent MGM films they made without Chaney. For that reason alone, it is interesting to see what Browning does without his ace actor.

The Mystic involves a trio of Hungarian gypsies who travel Europe with little more than a magic sideshow. Aileen Pringle plays the title character, named Zara, who claims to have mystical powers. A man named Michael Nash, played by Conway Tearle, approaches them with an idea to come to the United States to make even more money by holding séances with rich people and tricking them into believing they're seeing the ghosts of their loved ones. When they arrive, however, the quartet's plans get a monkey wrench thrown into it, when Nash feels sorry for one of their potential victims.

This is a very typical Browning story in that the crooks have to deal with their moral problems and how that affects others - Very similar to 'The Unholy Three' in this fashion. The lead crook, who is often Chaney, has a heart and this is one of Browning's favorite tricks for getting audience sympathy. Also, Browning loves to show us behind-the-scenes looks of magicians and mystics and the technical ways they execute their "powers". However, there is no additional gimmick in this film. No one is deformed and there is no gorilla in the mix. In that sense it is rather refreshing and at the same time a bit tame if you are a fan of Browning's films. It seems he and Young tried to up the ante with every film they collaborated on by coming up with different and more extreme sideshow scenarios, and in "The Mystic", their second film together, they seem early in their game. Browning's obsessions, of course, reached its ultimate stage in 1932 with Freaks.

The print I saw of The Mystic had french subtitles below the English inter-titles. It seems to be the most rare of all of Browning's surviving films from his 1925-1939 MGM period. Most of his earliest films are all but impossible to see. There was no musical score or track, but it is obviously a privilege to view this. It is worth noting that Browning's last film with Chaney was also his last film with Young. Waldemar Young often gets left out of the discussion of the Chaney-Browning collaborations, but in my view he is an essential part of those teamings and deserves perhaps as much credit as them.

This fantastic film I'd never even heard of until today, made by the creator of the immortal Freaks (1932) and Dracula (1931), Tod Browning. It's never even been released on any home video format before, but the recent blu-ray has been lovingly restored, and now, almost a hundred years later, looks the best it ever has, with one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard accompany a silent, care of the long-time David Lynch collaborator Dean Hurley, who adds a woozy, warped, disorientating atmosphere you can cut with a knife, along with painstakingly-added sound effects, all of which enhance the experience enormously. Every silent film should be accompanied in this way.

Like Freaks, Mystic is the story of carnival folk with a moral code of their own, this time a phony psychic act that travels from Hungary to New York to try get rich by fleecing the wealthy before falling foul of the law. It loses steam a little towards the end, but the early parts put me in mind of Nightmare Alley (1947) and Varieté (released the same year, 1925), and it's not far off being as good as them both, which is quite the complement. A splendid discovery.

7.5/10.