I wouldn't have bet a plug nickel that "Sucker Money" would wind up as entertaining and interesting as it turned out to be. It had the look and feel of those 1930's era 'educational' films that purported to warn the viewer about the dangers of illicit drugs, alcohol or sex, but in this case the film was an attempt at exposing the psychic racket. The story actually had decent continuity, even if some of the players presented were extremely over the top, starting with the phony Swami (Mischa Auer), and including characters like Princess Karami (Mona Lisa, why not use her real name?), and the two black bodyguards dressed in their own set of Indian Hindu garb. Seeing them, I knew it was only a matter of time before the flick fell into racial stereotype, and they're shown throwing dice in a subsequent scene, as reporter Jimmy Reeves (Earl McCarthy) notes to the one rolling a winner - "Yo' sho' is lucky, Big Boy"!
The thing is, while watching, I got a sense that old Swami was a truly evil guy, and it wouldn't take much for him to dispose of anyone who got in the way of his making a really big score. Which got kind of wasted when he discovered Reeves' real identity as a newspaper reporter, and then just let him roam around fairly freely within the confines of the operation. You would think that Jimmy would be a quick goner, and the Swami and his crowd could have pulled off the twenty thousand dollar heist of old Walton without any further trouble. It also seemed pretty convenient that the law showed up in time to make the save, but this was over seventy years ago, and there wasn't a whole lot of time and effort that went into making a story believable if put under a microscope. Which is OK if it passes the entertainment test, and I think this was a good try if one's not too critical.
I really have to thank Mill Creek Entertainment for putting out a package that makes pictures like this available to old time film junkies like myself; without them one would never even know that they existed. This one was part of a two hundred fifty movie set on sixty double sided DVD's as party of their Mystery Collection. The great thing is, by the time you get around to viewing all the movies in the set, you wind up forgetting what the first ones you saw were all about, and you can go ahead and do it all over again!
The thing is, while watching, I got a sense that old Swami was a truly evil guy, and it wouldn't take much for him to dispose of anyone who got in the way of his making a really big score. Which got kind of wasted when he discovered Reeves' real identity as a newspaper reporter, and then just let him roam around fairly freely within the confines of the operation. You would think that Jimmy would be a quick goner, and the Swami and his crowd could have pulled off the twenty thousand dollar heist of old Walton without any further trouble. It also seemed pretty convenient that the law showed up in time to make the save, but this was over seventy years ago, and there wasn't a whole lot of time and effort that went into making a story believable if put under a microscope. Which is OK if it passes the entertainment test, and I think this was a good try if one's not too critical.
I really have to thank Mill Creek Entertainment for putting out a package that makes pictures like this available to old time film junkies like myself; without them one would never even know that they existed. This one was part of a two hundred fifty movie set on sixty double sided DVD's as party of their Mystery Collection. The great thing is, by the time you get around to viewing all the movies in the set, you wind up forgetting what the first ones you saw were all about, and you can go ahead and do it all over again!