SPOILERS COMING UP
THE CLAIRVOYANT (known in a truncated form as THE EVIL MIND) was a film made in England in 1934, co-starring Claude Rains as Maximus and Fay Wray as his wife and stage assistant Rene. They have a reasonably good music hall mentalist act, in which Wray has to find valuables in the audience that fit a code that Rains knows by heart (he is blindfolded, of course). She picks up a watch and says something that mentions "time" and he knows it is a watch. That sort of thing.
Well one night the act has started going well, but Wray gets lost going into the private boxes, and she gets locked out of the theater. Rains is lost without her feeding him the code. He stumbles on the stage, and the audience jeers and gets rowdy. Then something odd happens - Rains has some kind of actual vision. A man in the audience has jeeringly asked if he can say what is he holding. Rains, says it is a letter from the man's wife. Then he corrects himself and says it is about the wife...and she's getting worse. Rains says to the man he should hurry to her. The man does just that. This was no plant but a genuine incident. Maximus faints at the end of the incident.
Maximus' mother (Mary Clare) realizes what has happened. There is a family tradition going back to her father of sudden visions and such affecting them. In short, although the music hall act is a fake, Maximus actually has the potential of being a genuine clairvoyant (similar to Whoopie Goldberg's character in GHOST, who also has a family history of second sight). Still the incident can be lightly passed by, but while Maximus, Rene, Mother, and their friend Simon (Ben Field) are on a train to Manchester Maximus sees a young woman who was in the audience at the theater. She is (as it turns out) Christine Shawn (Jane Baxter) the daughter of a powerful newspaper owner, Lord Southwood (Athole Stewart). Christine and Maximus exchange looks, and Maximus has another trance. He suddenly foresees a train disaster. He pulls the emergency cord, stopping the train as it goes into a tunnel, and argues with the conductor to allow the passengers to disembark. The conductor refuses, but Maximus and his party, Christine, and another person disembark. They are escorted out of the tunnel by a railway employee, only to learn the train did get into a bad collision.
This incident gets publicity, so that Maximus is suddenly famous - and is able to get a nice billing and contract at a "Palladium" type theater in London. But the producer keeps insisting on him producing prophecies or else. He does produce one at the last moment - the winner of the Derby. In a nicely handled incident Maximus is escorted to the Derby by Christine while an increasingly jealous Rene goes with Mother and Simon. Maximus watches the 100 - 1 shot horse he names run a fantastic, photo-finish race, and win.
Lord Southwood signs Maximus to a contract for his newspapers, although the mind-reader can't explain his power, except to say the power is unexpected when it turns up. It is also a power that leaves him feeling helpless. He sees his mother momentarily after she hangs up a telephone on him, and realizes it bodes no good. Sure enough she dies in a fall shortly afterward.
The final prediction is of another disaster - a tunnel cave-in that Rains tried to prevent from happening. He is blamed for it, because it is believed that his addressing the doomed men caused them to panic while blasting. He is put on trial, and just barely escapes because he predicts that the survivors of the collapse are nearly out of a side tunnel they have been digging out of (he announces this minutes before the news actually arrives at the courthouse).
The film is on par with the Edward G. Robinson masterpiece, THE NIGHT HAS 1,000 EYES, wherein Robinson, a fake mentalist, does develop second sight, and find it never helps anyone. That isn't quite the case here, but Rains finds that he can't direct his power to help people as he would wish. Two hundred men are lost in the tunnel, and people were still injured in the train wreck. But worse, he is blamed for these disasters - and understandably so (his warnings do cause nervousness and panic). But the business with the letter and the horse also show that he is not a fraud.
The film looks cheap because it was made in England in the early 1930s (it's a Gainsborough picture). But for that period it has good standards. The love triangle is not as strong as it should be, because of the writing of Jane Baxter's role - she does not seem to be unscrupulous enough to try to steal Rains from Wray. But the affection between Wray and Rains is real enough. All in all it is a pretty good film for it's time.
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