Bernard Vorhaus’s career as a director never properly settled down. Born in America, he earned his spurs directing imaginative and lively talkies in England, then crossed back in 1937 to direct the most varied second-feature material – John Wayne, “Dr. Christian” movies, two vehicles for the curly-headed little warbler Bobby Breen, even an ice-skating musical with Vera Hruba Ralston. Enough was eventually enough. He tried low- budget production in New York, then in 1951 the blacklist hit. Career over.

But not his reputation. The flair that excited critics when he was rediscovered in the 1980s is fully visible in this gorgeously styled psychological drama. This atmospheric Eagle-Lion frolic is the last film he made in Hollywood, and one of several benefiting from cameraman John Alton’s genius at painting with light.

Vorhaus called it “the silliest story”, and he was right. But as Lynn Bari paces Alton’s plush folds of darkness on the mansion set, pinpricked by candles or light from a distant door, who is going to bother with logic?

A wealthy grieving widow with a cliff-top mansion facing the Pacific, Bari proves an easy target for the character played by Turhan Bey. He’s a phoney spiritualist of unctuous tones, rarely without his attendant crow (the bird even fetches his master’s cigarettes). But tricksters can be tricked too, and the hocus- pocus of disembodied hands and gusts of cold air becomes outclassed by the filmmakers’ own legerdemain. In The Spiritualist style and subject are very satisfyingly fused.

Silly or not, Crane Wilbur’s story had a topical basis. “In Hollywood at the time,” Vorhaus recalled in the 1980s, “every other corner on the road to Santa Monica had some kind of phoney church, with a man who summoned the spirits of the dead or offered spiritual hope and a massage combined. The craziest things. So it was rather fun making the film.” And great, great fun to watch.

Geoff Brown