Miracles for Sale

Browning’s last film, adapted from mystery novelist Clayton Rawson’s Death from a Top Hat, is a briskly paced locked-room whodunnit that showcases the director’s fascination with the moral implications of professional magic-making. The Amazing Morgan (Robert Young) is a debonair ex-magician in New York City who’s settled into a career devising original illusions and selling them to working prestidigitators. He’s also made a name for himself as a principled debunker of fraudulent spiritualists, and when his help is enlisted by a young woman seeking to expose the truth about famed psychic Madame Rapport (an otherworldly Gloria Holden), Morgan stumbles into a murder investigation around the death of a mysterious “demonologist.” A series of encounters with fellow illusionists follows as Morgan aids police detectives in their efforts to narrow down the list of suspects, and the result is Browning’s swan song, a final cinematic homage to the craft and mechanics of theatrical trickery. 35mm print preserved by George Eastman Museum.