The Amazing Mr. X
1948 · 78 min · Thriller
The Amazing Mr. X (1948), aka The Spiritualist, shot by John Alton at the very top of his game. Watch the full 1940s noir free, with no account required.
A widow who keeps hearing her dead husband's voice on the beach meets a courteous man called Alexis who says he can reach him. Turhan Bey plays him as a fraud with real charm and a raven on his shoulder, running a seance racket on grieving people with money, and the film cares less that he is lying than how well he does it.
The reason to watch is John Alton. He shot it for Eagle-Lion, and the seance sequences are among the best known he ever lit. He put the film in his own book, Painting With Light, published in 1949, the first book about cinematography written by a working cameraman.
Bernard Vorhaus directed. He was blacklisted three years later and never made another American picture.
This film has an audio description track, written and recorded here, so a blind or low-vision viewer can follow it by ear. There is nothing to switch on — the description is in the film’s own sound, so pressing play is the whole of it.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
Is The Amazing Mr. X public domain? The rights evidence — the copyright registration, the renewal search and the sources we checked, written out in full so you can check them too.
Watch it here
This is our restoration, with the audio description track mixed in. There is nothing to switch on: press play and the description is in the sound. It is free, there is no account, and nothing is counted.
Sound only — 144 MB rather than 606 MB. Everything the described master says, without the picture.
Or watch it with the picture:
The same film without description, if you would rather have the original sound alone.
Every film here that carries audio description — what description is, who it is for, and how ours are made.
How this print was restored
This copy of The Amazing Mr. X was restored here, from a print that had been through a good deal before it reached us. The work finished on 2026-09-02. Every step is listed below, because a re-encode passed off as a restoration is worth nothing and the only way to tell them apart is to say what was done.
- deflicker (frame brightness varied 2.05 within scenes); audio spectral denoise (floor -34 dBFS); no levels change (true black 12, white 226 measured over every second of the film); 388 audio description cues, Kokoro am_michael at 157 wpm, seated by measured length in measured dialogue pauses, 0 collisions; delivery mix -16 LUFS / -2.9 dBTP; title card joined without re-encoding the picture
The print we started from is here, so the before and after can be compared.
More like this: Free thrillers and suspense films.