Silent movies - The Charlatan

While checking the channels on my new TV stick, I came upon one that, much to my surprise, offered me several silent movies. I randomly picked one of them, so let's talk about The Charlatan from 1929 today.

Here's the plot (with spoilers).
A woman goes to sideshow fortune teller Count Merlin. She's shocked when he calls her by a current name, but then the name she had before ... and he's looking into her past in his crystal ball.

Before marrying a rich man, Florence Talbot had been a trapeze artist and the wife of clown Peter Dwight. One evening she took off with Richard Talbot. Peter never got over her also taking their daughter Ann.
What Florence doesn't know is that Count Merlin is actually Peter Dwight and he still wants his daughter back after all these years.

Florence has her eyes on another man by now, her doctor Walter Paynter, and she'd elope with him rather sooner than later.
At a dinner party, Mrs. Deering who took her to Count Merlin and is the District Attorney's wife, suggests to invite the fortune teller to the Talbots' house.
Merlin and his helpers accept and he reads palms and shows off his "disappearing lady" act. His audience draws cards to determine who will be disappearing in the afternoon. It's Florence.

Someone has different plans, though, and places a sharp pin in the back of the box (of course we all know there's a hidden compartment) on which they put some kind of liquid.
Indeed the trick fails this time and they find the dead Florence in the back of the cabinet. Dr. Paynter immediately determines poison as the cause of death and of course Count Merlin is the main suspect.

District Attorney Deering questions him, but Merlin and his helpers abduct him and Merlin disguises as Deering and goes back to the house to question all the suspects - the cuckolded Richard Talbot, the lover Dr. Paynter, the cheated Mrs. Paynter, but also Ann's boyfriend who has tried to leave the building.

Then he reveals that he's Peter Dwight, Florence's ex-husband and Ann's father.
And the murderer is ....

Richard Talbot

 !

The movie is another one based on a play.
You know "The Jazz Singer" with Al Jolson started the big talkie wave in 1927, and indeed "The Charlatan" had talking sequences which are lost, however.

As I said, this was a random choice and I didn't expect much from the movie. Actually, I don't know what I expected at all, but not a murder from the title.
I was really pleasantly surprised about this old whodunit. You may remember "The Bat" which was more or less people running from one room to the next. This movie wasn't at all like that. We had a nice introduction to the backstory, a solid build-up of motives for our suspects, we had a neat little murder (and no bodies got left on a staircase), and there was the clever idea how to enable our main character to investigate in a very good disguise.

There were a few small things that made me giggle a bit, for example Dr. Paynter calling the poison something similar to Curare, the South American virus, or the way Merlin accused one suspect after the other (which I have seen in more modern mysteries as well), but that really didn't take away from me enjoying this film very much.
It was a little like watching an episode of a TV crime show today (at a runtime of an hour), a Poirot (with all the suspects in one room at the end) for instance, just in worse film quality and with less elaborate sets.


I didn't really need a source for this post except the info about the movie being based on a play, but here's another review, anyway.
Fritzi Kramer: The Charlatan (1929) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, February 3, 2013