MIRACLE WORKERS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 May 1940, Page 9

MIRACLE WORKERS

ROBERT YOUNG LEARNS SECRETS

Playing a magician provided Robert Young with the most' fun as well as the most problems he has ever faced in a- picture role. So declared the hero of “Miracles For Sale,” strange detective mystery played amid a group of magicians and clairvoyants, and teeming with illusions and supernatural manifestations. Directed by Tod Browning, creator of “Dracula” and the Lon Chaney mysteries, with Florence Rice as the heroine, the picture takes the audience backstage among _ modern miracle workers to ■follow the train of an uncanny crime.

“It was fun,” says Young, “to learn all the tricks I had to perform as a professional magician. But it was hard to do the tricks and at the same time enact the part, speak lines, and keep my mind on the character. Tricks and such feats of dexterity really have to become second nature before the actor can perform them and still concentrate on his part. Chester Morris, who is a real magician, worked with me and helped me, and, of course, Paul le Paul, professional magician, coached me for days. But I was always nervous after a scene with a trick in it. So was Henry Hull, also a magician in the picture.” The weird details of the story, Young says, sometimes “got” horn. “That ectoplasm or materialisation of a ghost,” he says, “always gave me a queer feeling. I knew it was a trick,

but to watch the thing form does something to one's psychology. It was the same when I looked at the Headless Woman. 1 even knew how that trick was done, and still had difficulty looking at it.” Young presents a number of tricks, including a new Tod Browning version of “Sawing a Woman in Half.” the bullet trick in which a bullet is fired at Florence Rice, who apparently catches it in her teeth, several escape tricks, and the odd spiritualistic seances.

“The seances," says Young, “were probably more harrowing than the straight illusions. We all knew they were being staged by trickery,, but they became so baffling that even knowledge that they’re tricks gives one a sense of danger. If the actors sensed this, audiences must sense i‘ much more sharply.”