Word: hypnotist
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...Hypnotist Cannon makes it abundantly clear that there is nothing mysterious or difficult about the technique. All that is necessary is for the subject to relax, drive all thought from his mind, fix his attention on some object (usually a bright light), listen to the operator's soothing suggestions of sleep. The hypnotic state resembles sleep except that the unconscious mind is in touch with the operator and can be swayed by his suggestions. Almost everybody, unless he is confident of being able to resist and does resist, can be hypnotized into the first "light" state; three persons...
...subject's left eye, at the same time grasping his hands firmly. In a little while the operator's eye appears to shine brilliantly and the patient's expression becomes vacant. Dr. Cannon finds certain defects in this procedure: "If the patient is refractory and the hypnotist is tired, the hypnotist may be hypnotized by the patient. . . . The first sign of the hypnotism being reversed is very unpleasant...
Claude Rains, whose hypnotist's face has worked, visibly and invisibly, in The Invisible Man, Crime Without Passion, The Man Who Reclaimed His Head, plays the part of a hack vaudeville mind-reader. When his faked act misses fire one night, he suddenly discovers that he has a real and appalling ability to see into the future. He correctly foretells one disaster and his fortune seems made. Except for one profitable Derby winner, further prophecies are all of death. His wife (Fay Wray) begins to think he is going mad and the public begins to think...
...knowledge of mental activity that all students of psychology must have a smattering of its mechanism. It is merely a deep sleep which a person can bring upon himself. Usually, however, the subject puts himself in a relaxed position and stares at some bright object above his head. The hypnotist, meanwhile, cajolingly suggests that he is sleepy. Bye & bye he falls asleep. In that sleep he will, like Trilby, do many of the things the hypnotist tells him to do. Sometimes the strain of a subject's attempts to obey the hypnotist are so psychically awesome, so physically real...
...second manner (Moby Dick, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) involves the creation of sinister atmosphere by means of makeup, pale rolling eyes, false whiskers, mouth pieces used for the distortion of the teeth, and stilts in his shoes to make him look taller. He is Svengali, the musical hypnotist of the Latin quarter, in a story that is Du Maurier's Trilby except that the character of Trilby (Marian Marsh) is played down and Svengali played up. Barrymore handles all the artifices of the acting trade with gusto and intelligence. He meets Trilby at the time when...