The only really normal person in The Amazing Mr. X, Richard Carlson’s Martin Abbott, is presented as a complete dope. It’s that sort of film – exotics, psychotics, psychics, camp conmen and vamps circle each other while boring old Martin sits stupidly at the centre.
The two real reasons to watch are Cathy O’Donnell, again effortlessly sexy as she was in They Live by Night. She plays the concerned sister trying to get her widowed sibling Christine (Lynn Bari) to marry again. To… you guessed it… chump and dullard Martin. Christine is understandably hesitant. Martin clearly a mistake. But Christine is also reluctant to let go of the hope that husband Paul (Donald Curtis) is still somehow alive out there. At night she is sure she can hear his voice calling to her from over the ocean. And, to ease her mind, she turns to a medium, Alexis, to find out what fate has in store for her.
Turhan Bey, as Alexis, is the other good reason to watch. An Austrian with Turkish lineage, Bey was known to his fans as the “Turkish Delight”. As in gelatinous, over-fragrant and covered in tooth-rotting sugar? That’s exactly the character Alexis is and Bey, brilliantined hair, pencil moustache, pipe and evening dress (on the beach!), pushes at the envelope in his portrayal of a man who is obviously a phoney.
The Amazing Mr. X could have left it there and the result would have been well-upholstered nonsense, but it has other things to offer – a few good plot twists, other interesting characters and a shock reveal. The result is both camp and fascinating. But there’s something else rumbling away beneath – a concern to tread carefully with the feelings of people in the audience who lost someone in wartime and turned to spiritualism for help.
There are levels and subtexts. Christine has a servant who, it turns out, is working against her. There are moments of movie magic – a séance where Alexis pulls out all the stops and gets all the ectoplasm and ghostly manifestation going. There is fabulous lighting, courtesy of the great John Alton, who dredges Christine in so much soft focus that at one point her face appears to be swimming in soup.
Perhaps Alton’s lighting is a commentary on the material, maybe it’s ironic, it could be that he’s pointing up the fairytale aspect of the whole thing. Whatever it is, he’s on the side of the special-effects guys, whose wafty, ghostly apparitions are much easier to pull off when there’s barely a sharp line on the screen.
Bey is top billed but really O’Donnell is the star. She’s the film’s protagonist, at one point taking over from a private eye hired expressly to expose Alexis for the fraud he is. Some bit of plot nonsense is injected at this point to explain why she’s going into the lion’s den single-handed. I mean, why bother with the private eye at all (who is uncredited, though Harry Mendoza does good if scant work)?
It’s a bit of a cult item and it’s easy to see why. Bey is brilliantly slippery. O’Donnell is silly and sexy as determined sister Janet, and director Bernard Vorhaus (a career stalled by Senator McCarthy’s investigations) keeps everything and everyone moving in the way you expect from kooky 1940s period product – crows caw, shadows lurk, doors close on their own.
The twist is a good one, and recasts Alexis as well as deepening his character. Is he such a bad guy or just someone making the most of it in go-getting post-War America? Aren’t the rest of them, stuck in the past, facilitating his machinations? Interesting, fascinating, really worth a look.
The Amazing Mr. X – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
