The Amazing Mr. X (a `Samba Productions' release) sure doesn't promise much but goes on to deliver a little bit extra. Like the far more accomplished and haunting Nightmare Alley of the previous year, it deals with a phoney spiritualist racket. And, as in that earlier film, the supernatural wraiths and voices prove a poor match for the very natural greed and duplicity that operate on a deeper, darker level than the racket.

Lynn Bari mopes around her big old house by the sea mourning her dead husband. One evening, waiting for her fiancé (Richard Carlson), she encounters a mysterious stranger (Turhan Bey) down by the water's edge. He knows a lot about her and her late spouse, and intimates that the spirit realm lies close. When she falls for his schemes, her kid sister (Cathy O'Donnell) attempts to expose Bey, but ends up being swept away by his unctuous charm. Meanwhile, Carlson and a detective themselves fail to rip the lid off Bey's racket, complete with seances and apparitions. But it turns out that the husband (Donald Curtis) is in fact quite close, if not so incorporeal as most of the principals believe....

It's a B or B- movie that has a few things in its favor. Bey was sort of a1940s Poverty-Row prototype of Omar Sharif who still has his fans (he played, among so many other exotic roles, Jules Amthor in the first version of Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely: The Falcon Takes Over). Bari and O'Donnell aren't bad, either. But the presence of John Alton as cinematographer raises the whole enterprise up a few notches. While obviously orders of magnitude less persuasive than the computer-generated effects of Industrial Light and Magic, his spooks and specters were state-of-the-art for their era. And the story, by Leslie Charteris, manages to keep its integrity. The Amazing Mr. X is a cozy Gothic for watching after the clock strikes midnight.