"It's Almost Like Fate, Isn't It?" - The Crystal Ball
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In honour of his birthday, let's take a deep dive into one of my favourite Ray Milland comedies, The Crystal Ball!
You can read other deep dives into The Major and the Minor and Easy Living, both Ray Milland classics, by clicking the links. Let's dive in!
We open in the fanciest bathroom I've ever seen. It belongs to Jo Ainsly, a young woman with a large fortune, and she's getting ready for a night out. Her maid, Miss Foster, is helping her get ready... And pockets one of her largest rings. After she notices it missing, Miss Foster, worries that Jo will think she stole it and fire her, since she's so brand new.
She suggests that Jo visit Madame Zenobia to find out what happened to the ring.
Then we cut to Miss Foster speaking with Madame Zenobia. Grifters attract grifters! They're in the middle of talking about a grift when someone comes in to have their fortune told.
"Probably some dame weighing a ton wondering why her husband's fooling around with a size 14," Madame Zenobia says.
Enter Paulette Goddard, as Toni Gerard, a young woman who wants to know what her future holds. She can only afford 38 cents worth of a future though, but Zenobia says it's bargain day, and offers her a full fortune.
"A man has been unkind to you, I see him turning you down," she tells Toni.
There were nine of them, Toni says. She entered a beauty contest but lost to a blonde. She wants to know where she'll sleep tonight, more specifically. She's in New York without a job, and only a grandfather in Texas who doesn't approve of beauty contests.
She says she's always been right outside of (of Waco, of Fort Worth, etc.) her whole life and now she wants to be in the centre. Her dream would be to win a national beauty contest and get a USO contract to perform all over the world.
While she's getting ready to leave her apartment in the fortune teller's studio, enter Ray Milland. He's playing Brad Kavanaugh, Jo's attorney. He's rather unimpressed by everything in the area, and pauses to read a sandwich board that would likely stop me on the street. "Fleas, fortune tellers, what's the difference?" he asks as Jo wanders over to Madame Zenobia's studio.
"Long trips across water always make me seasick. I have absolutely no desire to find a tall, dark man," he says, when Jo asks if he wants his fortune read.
Toni watches him, enthralled, and nearly forgets the ruse.
When she does come back to shoot, with Brad next to her, she does it haphazardly. But at least she has a place to stay and a way to earn some cash.
Back at Jo's house, they've called a plumber, because Madame Zenobia told Jo she'd find the ring in a sink pipe, and wouldn't you know it! That's where it was! "You don't think she really saw your ring in the crystal thingamajig, do you?" Brad asks.
Jo's convinced: not only did she predict where the ring would be, she also knew about Jo's dead husband. It's enough for her to believe.
Just as they're planning another ruse, for Brad to buy a bad piece of land for Jo (in a plot point that goes waaay over my head), Madame Zenobia throws out her back. Toni, who'd been playing around at the crystal ball over a picture of Brad, comes rushing in to see if she's okay, and another plan comes into place...
Madame Zenobia wants Toni to go to the bazaar in her place and arrange it for Brad to buy the land. And, as long as she keeps the veil over her face, nobody'll know that she's not the real Madame Zenobia.
Toni goes to work planning out how she'll con everyone. She talks to a woman, Mrs. Smythe, who tells her that she's a photophobe (she's afraid of being afraid, all because she was once a child) who hides herself from everything, even her husband, who she hasn't seen in ages. Toni writes in her notebook 'Mrs. Smythe, nuts!'
Toni then visits Biff Carter, Brad's chauffeur and bodyman, to find out something about Brad. She pretends to be from the government, asking questions about ways to identify him should there be an accident. Biff tells her that Brad has buckshot scars that only he knows about...on a place where the sun doesn't shine, and draws what they look like.
The bazaar finally arrives, and Miss Foster is there to greet the new Madame Zenobia and instructs her to go downstairs and set up. Brad and Jo arrive (I love her dress!) and make the rounds.
Toni welcomes her first fortune seeker, Mrs. Smythe. "I'm being controlled by a Southern lady, a spirit!" she tells her. "I see you doing something very peculiar." She says she sees her hiding under a sofa from her husband, and he's trying to find her. "I see something else! There's another man, he's here..."
Jo thanks Brad for arranging the property deal for her. She says she'll have so much oil she'll be brewing gasoline. Mrs. Smythe interrupts them to tell Jo about her fortune from Madame Zenobia; and that she's also looking for a man who's at the party.
Jo and Mrs. Smythe can't make heads or tails of it, but one glance at the paper and Brad knows it's him (it's the buckshot scars Biff drew earlier).
He rushes down to Madame Zenobia's booth where she's now being controlled by the spirit of an Indigenous man (using a very racist accent, so I'm not going to transcribe exactly what she says). Her message for Brad is that Jo will drown in oil, the property will spring a leak, and that he should buy it before someone else does.
He says he already has, and that there's no oil anywhere near the property.
Trying to keep him there, she tells him she has another message that has to do with his scars. He'll have a lot of pleasure coming soon. She says that she sees a redhead in his future, and that he'll meet her tomorrow at a restaurant chomping on an apple.
Brad says there are two issues with her fortune: it'll be Saturday, so he'll be on the golf course; and when he eats, he eats at the men's club, so there's no way a redheaded woman will be there.
The next day, just as he's getting ready to leave for the golf course, he gets a phone call from a disgruntled woman who found a dead mouse in a teapot.
He tells the restaurant owner to refund her, but she doesn't want the refund. Brad says he'll stop by to fix the situation before heading to the golf course.
He gets there and guess who's waiting for him? A redheaded woman named Toni. "Do I look like the sort of person who carries a dead... well, do I, Mr. Kavanaugh?"
They try to arrange a financial settlement so that she won't sue, but Toni only him to learn his lesson so that he won't do it again. Brad invites her to lunch somewhere else, to take her mind off the terrible experience she'd had there, and she happily accepts.
On the drive, Toni takes a huge, theatrical bite of the apple, and Brad finally puts two and two together. He wonders about fate and how that had been the first time he'd been in that restaurant in over a year. But now that he's seen the fortune come true, he realizes that "you've just got to relax and let it happen."
Then his tire blows.
They walk back to the service station and she references the spirit she'd been portraying the night before; Brad's even more hooked after that.
After their day together, Brad insists on driving her back to her place and walking her up. She tries to brush him off, but he insists on going all the way up to her apartment door. When they get to the fifth floor, she picks a door at random, and tries again to brush him off.
"Forget your key?" he asks, then wonders why she doesn't try the doorbell (too much noise; but then the telephone would be just as noisy, no?). Then he tries the door, it's unlocked, and she reluctantly enters the room.
"This whole place looks like a broken down gin mill," the woman who lives inside says, beating her husband over the head. Toni tries not to get caught, but they spot her, and the wife thinks she's yet another fling.
"Whatever she came here for, she's leaving without," the wife says, ripping at her clothes. "And don't come back, get me?" she screams, pushing her out into the hall.
Later, Brad and Biff are talking while Brad's getting ready for dinner and cocktails with Jo. Brad's still caught up about Toni, and wants Biff to send flowers to her. So Biff does just that, going up to the apartment that Toni pointed out...
...and gets caught by the husband thinking that someone's there to see his wife. "Flowers, from Mr. Kavanaugh," he says. The card reads "let's let it happen again," and another fight erupts when the wife comes to see who was at the door.
Biff returns with the flowers in their damaged box and summons Brad to explain. "You had the wrong apartment!" he exclaims. Maybe even the wrong street, the wrong city, the wrong everything! When Jo comes in to see what's going on, Brad re-gifts her the flowers to keep the peace.
Later, Brad shows up at Creighton House to see for himself if Toni's there. Before he can knock, the elderly neighbour, who'd had a front row seat to Toni and Biff's knocks, asks if she can watch the spectacle.
The husband opens the door, and when he finds out that it's Brad Kavanaugh, he decks him. "You were the best of all of them!" the neighbour exclaims.
Brad's leaving for an appointment from his law firm with Toni hot on his tail. They manage to get in the same elevator together, and Toni whistles to get his attention. "We haven't seen much of you lately," she says. "We'd wondered if we'd done something."
"Toni, I met your old aunt," he says. "Next time tell her she needs a shave." He then asks her if she's married, and to at least have told him, but Toni wants to explain. She says she never lived there, she was in the wrong building on the wrong street, and that it's because she grew up on a hog farm and gets herself confused in the big city.
Brad buys her excuse and takes her dancing (though he tells her he's going to beat her to death, which might have been romantic back in the '40s?). Toni recognizes the waiter as the fired one from the restaurant, and finds out that Brad helped secure him a new job.
Jo's eating at the same restaurant though, and sees Brad and Toni together. She tries to convince herself that it's because he's an attorney entertaining a client. She summons the waiter and writes him a note ("I think your old uncle is charming," she writes).
When Brad reads the note, they begin to talk about Jo and her late husband, who was Brad's best friend. He was killed in a hunting accident and Brad says that he's the only one she has left. Her husband even suggested that Brad and Jo would make a great couple, which nauseates Toni. She says that he shouldn't have led her along like he loved her if he knew he would always go back to Jo, and he argues that he never said he loved her.
She calls him a coyote and runs off.
Back at the shooting game, Toni's commiserating with Pop, saying that maybe she shouldn't have been so forthright with Brad about her feelings about Jo. He tells her to take a night off, that they'll calculate how much money Madame Zenobia would've earned from Toni tonight, and they'll figure out a way to make it up to her.
Toni goes back to the fortune-telling booth to speak with Jo. "I simply had to rush down and see you," she says. Toni writes that she has a sore throat and can't talk, but she can still scan the crystal ball for the answers. Jo wants to know how to hurry a man into marriage, and that she thinks he's into another woman. "I've seen her. Strictly haystack," she says. "Tell me what to do."
Toni writes:
CRY - GET MAD - FAINT!
"If he doesn't come after you, threaten to kill yourself... That seems like strange advice. Yes, I know but... I've never gone wrong listening to you yet," Jo says. "If this works, I'll let you dance at my wedding."
Jo follows her advice to the letter: she goes away on vacation and sends notes to Brad's office that she's sad, crying and that she's going to kill herself. She wants him to join her in the country, but he has too much work to do. He's got Toni on his mind and suddenly she calls.
"If you're not doing anything tonight, I think I could get away," she says.
Then some businessman wants to talk about the property that Brad bought for Jo. He has a few questions about the way he runs Jo's affairs, and how he's the only one who gives her advice.
Turns out he's a government investigator who's questioning Brad for sabotage of the war effort, and a judge orders him free on $25,000 bail. With all this hubbub, he missed his dinner date with Toni.
Toni's waiting for him at the restaurant, dressed to the nines, but Biff shows up in his place. She has to hold up her compact so he can't see her face (he'd recognize her as the investigator who asked about the buckshot scars), but he figures out who she is anyways and tells her that Brad went up to the country to see Jo.
Biff tells her that he'll let her know what happens with Jo, and Toni says not to worry, she already knows what'll happen: "I'll be dancing at her wedding."
Uh oh!
Brad shows up at Madame Zenobia's but nobody's there. Toni's just wandering back and sees the commotion, and hides behind his car while he talks to Pop.
When he walks back to his car, he sees a note written in lipstick on the windshield urging him not to go to the country, she's foreseen two accidents. "Maybe one of her spirits got loose," Pop says.
"Tell that old hag she'd better be here when I get back from Connecticut," he yells as he drives away.
Out on the open road...
...Madame Zenobia's prediction comes true.
And then, as he's being transported via ambulance to the hospital...
...Madame Zenobia's second prediction comes true.
The next morning, Toni reads about Brad's accidents in the paper. "If I'm right about that, maybe I'm right about the other things. Maybe he will marry her!" she says, rushing off to find him.
Brad's in bed asking Jo about the property he'd bought for her, wondering if Madame Zenobia revealed anything to her, but she says she passed on everything she'd been told. Toni shows up and meets Jo as her real self; Jo's less than impressed.
Biff helps Brad get dressed, and then the three of them get in the car to go find Madame Zenobia. "Madame Zenobia is all things to all men," so they say.
Toni plays dumb, asking what happened, and Brad lets Madame Zenobia have it. When they get there and the studio's locked, Brad kicks down the door.
They go into her darkened room and find it empty, so they go further into the apartments. Toni hides a suitcase with her initials on it, but then Jo opens a closet with a bunch of her distinct clothes hanging on the back of the door. Toni pretends to feel faint just as Brad would've been about to see; and he says he'll go to the shooting game next door.
"She may be gone for good," Pop says. Then the boy who's always hanging around comes in and nearly ruins it for them, but one good step on his arch keeps him quiet.
She got Mrs. Ainsley to take an option on a property that the government wanted, and with Brad advising her, it looks suspicious.
Toni hops out of the car, pretending to have another appointment, and takes off.
Jo then pulls the same, leaving Brad all by himself.
"Some guys got it, and some ain't," the cab driver says. "You ain't."
Jo goes back to the shooting game to flirt with the boy. She asks him about Toni, buttering him up.
Toni shows up at Madame Zenobia's house to find out how she knew about the property, but Madame Zenobia's about to leave, and she won't reveal anything.
She threatens to call the cops and Dusty locks her in a closet so they can get away.
Just then, Jo shows up and meets them on the stairs. She says she's looking for Madame Zenobia, and Dusty says, "That's not even a name!" as they rush past her.
In the apartment, Jo hears Toni banging around and releases her from the closet. "You were so generous with advice for me, now let me tell you about your future."
Jo says that with Brad's opinion on fortune tellers, she'll never get him. The police will eventually get Madame Zenobia, and she'll reveal the truth, which will clear Brad. They'll also find out that Toni worked for her, and that she conspired to spend time with Brad, and that Jo will tell if she doesn't, so they won't believe that he had nothing to do with the 'sabotage' on the property.
Toni promises to go away to keep him safe. She tells the government investigator the truth, and he wonders why she wouldn't tell Brad the truth. He'd never forgive her, she says, for the trickery, and leaves.
"It seems there are two Madame Zenobias," he tells Brad as soon as Toni leaves.
Toni goes back to her crummy little apartment and finds Brad at the door. "Now you know," she says.
Brad takes her out into the fortune room, with the crystal ball, and asks how she knew about his scars. "A vision," she says, after Biff waves her off from the doorway. He agrees about visions, he says he has them, too, that he's in love with her.
Jo shows up, but Biff's guarding the door. He says Brad's busy and that she can't come in. "Why not?"
"He's deep in the heart of Texas," he smiles, closing the curtain.
THE END!
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