When The World Believed In Fairy Tales And Other Assorted “Fake Legends”-Woody Allen’s “Magic In The Moonlight” (2014)-A Film Review   

By Will Bradley

Magic In The Moonlight, starring Emma Stone, Colin Firth,      

Blessed be the niche writers. That at least is what I got for an answer from site manager Greg Green when I asked him why I was “chosen” to review the film under review Woody Allen’s Magic In The Moonlight. Apparently, and contrary to stated publication policy established by Greg and the then newly established Editorial Board set up to oversee the assignments and their distribution, I am now in the “legend-slayer” niche (and blessed) ever since I started taking up the cudgels again recently with reviews of fake legend Spider Man and real legend Jack Reacher.    

I am okay, and very much so, with the legend-slaying assignment which have been my entryway into getting my by-line ad freedom from free-lancer stringer status. But I will be damned if I know what legend I am supposed to be slaying in this frothy little 1920s based romance a la late Woody Allen after he stopped overusing the New York urban themes of his earlier career. My problem is that Moo Shi Beef or whatever alias Stanley Nevins, the famous magician who every aspiring magician even now bows down to, was using at the time when he was fooling everybody with parlor pink magic tricks in Paris and its environs was already a well- known charlatan and cultural appropriator (the Chinese garb and moniker of a well-born Englishman) who Lex Marshall had long ago exposed as a fraud and flim-flam artist who made his real money selling dope imported from China to his select clientele. Moo Shi Beef (sorry if I offend anybody but no insult is intended since Stanley worked the rackets under a bunch of names all Chinese as part of his scam but also to ease the way to get the dope he was peddling into England under an import-export license issued by a minister in high places who was being bribed by him. 

The female part of this legend-busting expose was the famous, or rather infamous Sophie Baker the well-known medium who bilked half the nobility, the male nobility although I am sure if she ran out of men she would have gone to the women’s side, of Europe before she was done. Although she never was fully exposed since she had secret lover in Scotland Yard and maybe another at Interpol I do not believe that recently anybody had thought of her as a legend. It turned out I was wrong that she was subject to a female cult of worshipers, especially among the Roma people and that her exploits are the stuff told to their children as an example of what it was like when the world could easily be hoodwinked by a beautiful if harebrained fraud. A whole generation of fortune-tellers, spiritualists, mediums, and grifters worked their rackets based on the little booklets she wrote on the subject after she retired to some castle in Nice.    

That was later though, after both Moo Shi, hell, I will call him his silly English name Stanley, and Sophie had passed their prime. This film is really the story of their brief affair (they were supposed to get married after Stanley had in a drunken stupor proposed to her but she backed out after some prince beckoned with castles and diamonds and Stanley could only offer the loot gathered from card tricks and magic travelling circus magic tricks) after Stanley, Stanley of all people although this was before Lex lowered the hammer on his operations to prove that Sophie was a fraud. See Stanley along with the Chinese magic tricks gag had a big reputation as a debunker of others, of being the last rational man in the Empire. Basically a snob and stuffed shirt. But that was part of his grift, his cover which is why Lex had to dig deeply to expose him and Lex always considered him a very worthy opponent for just that reason. She was brought in to break up Sophie’s scam, her seance silliness that half the English nobility and gentry were paying big dough to be thrilled by.  

Maybe it was that two kindred had so much blarney in common but from the first minute they met anybody who was around then could see that they would go under the silky sheets before long despite the eyewash they were feeding each other. And so it went back and forth, back and forth under the night they got drunk and wound up under those already mentioned silky sheets. I already have told that they would have a brief affair and no marriage despite Stanley’s proposal once Sophie went to serious gold-digger work on that dubbed prince. What I didn’t tell you is that Stanley’s fortunes rose for a while until Lex dumped his evidence on the world and he wound up selling life insurance on cold calls back in Bristol. We already know Sophie’s upscale fate. What I want to know is why was I brought into this low-rent scene when I could be taking dead aim at Tony Stark’s silly Avenger operation which desperately need to be exposed. For now.