Our menu this evening features two films from 1943 that are so similar in some respects, we can't help but believe some producer at Mill Creek felt impishly clever by putting them together on Disc 46. Why? Well, let's see -- we have two "horror comedies" that include:
- a pair of newlyweds who for some stupid reason plan to move into a country house, sight unseen (!!), immediately after their wedding;
- a zany cast of characters (one of whom is black) who intrude on the just-married couple, thereby putting a major damper on the honeymoon, and end up wildly overstaying their welcome;
- a group of hardened criminals who, when it comes to the old property, have an agenda all their own;
- plus so much more:
- confusion over addresses;
- wacky, clueless cops;
- menacing eyes staring out of hidden alcoves;
- heavy objects with felonious content, the transportation of which becomes a major plot point;
- repeated malapropisms for common words and phrases;
- etc., etc., etc.
Grade: F
When we read a review of a film like The Ghost and the Guest that describes it as "harmless fun", or "an amusing comedy", or (God help us) "a movie that you just never get tired of", we can't help but speculate:
Are these people really describing their experience of this actual, specific film, The Ghost and the Guest, from 1943? Or are they actually responding to the signifier they think it represents?
And by that we don't mean some uncharitable, Archie-and-Edith-Bunker-at-the-piano "Those Were the Days" longing for a time when everyone knew their place (and no one was, uh, uppity) -- at least not necessarily.
Rather, we simply mean to ask: do the people who watch this film, and claim to have the above reactions, really have those reactions, to this film? Or are they just saying what they think they're supposed to say, socially speaking? Did they really see the film, or just the idea of the film -- leaving them to vaguely recall a collection of signifiers that, in turn, prompt the automatic output of a pre-ordained set of phrases?
Because the thing is, The Ghost and the Guest isn't "fun" or "amusing" or "a movie that you never get tired of". It's a complete and utter piece of garbage. It's painfully unfunny, horribly written, insultingly stupid, and even downright offensive in places. Laboring through its 55 minutes was one of the most unpleasant tasks we've yet faced in our Umbrellahead journey. Every scene felt contrived, every plot point felt like it had just been extracted from a rhino's posterior, and every character's behavior was either stereotyped or arbitrary. As another reviewer points out, quite rightly:
"This film has been put together by someone who seems to know nothing about how people really behave. Look at the scene where the bride-to-be is yapping away on the phone with her friends; do people really stand around like that in real life as one of their number talks nonstop on the phone?"
From the very beginning, the motivation of our principals makes no sense. First, the wife (Florence Rice) is hell-bent on having them spend their honeymoon in the old house, though the reason she's so insistent is left totally opaque to us. Then, they swap places, and now it's the husband (James Dunn) who insists they stay. Are they both idiots? Yes, yes, they are.
Worst of all is the running gag about a retired executioner (Robert Dudley) who constantly chirps about how much he'd like their valet Harmony (Sam McDaniel) to try on one of his nooses, just for funsies. As we said last entry, we're hardly the sort to go looking for things to be offended by, but somehow it crosses a line to have a black man be the butt of a recurring, unfunny joke about lynching in 1940s America.
In short, there was nothing good about this film, unless you count a single half-smirk elicited by a line of dialogue from McDaniel -- and that's not enough, not remotely enough. We don't want to talk about The Ghost and the Guest anymore. It's a sad, dead film that doesn't deserve to be watched. Would that it were lost, so another, better film could be found instead.
Grade: D
Well, that's more like it. Not that Ghosts on the Loose is a great film, or even a passable 1940s comedy: it's an inoffensive but dull piece of work that got, at most, two vague chuckles out of us. But the inclusion of Béla Lugosi immediately ups the ante, and more or less ensures that something onscreen will be worth watching.
That said, Béla doesn't get much screentime at all, as the real stars are the East Side Kids -- a bunch of not-so-lovable, well-meaning hooligans. Their 22 (!) films demonstrate that, like the Dead End Kids and Bowery Boys, they were quite a profitable film franchise.
And, now and then, they bust into an 18th-century song with organ accompaniment.
One odd thing is that Ghosts on the Loose -- which, to be clear, has no actual ghosts on the actual loose -- bizarrely spends about half its running time on wedding preparations and rehearsals. Somehow it's not really a problem, but from a formal perspective it's hard to fathom...
...unless, of course, they set out to make a wedding picture and only then found out Lugosi was available. (But we have no evidence of that.)
It's a pleasant surprise -- and a big contrast with The Ghost and the Guest -- that the film's lone black character, Scruno (Ernest Morrison), isn't really singled out or treated differently in any obvious way: he's just another one of the East Side Kids. Is there a faint whiff of the cowardly, wide-eyed stereotype that mars many black characters in horror films? Well, maybe -- but it also clings to several of the other Kids, so it's a wash.
This movie is probably most famous for Béla's sneeze, and without knowing anything about it beforehand, we sure looked at each other afterwards: "Didn't he just say 'Aw, shit?'"
Allegedly it was a joke on his part, done for what he assumed would be a throwaway first take -- leaving him stunned when the take was declared final, and used in the film. Maybe it's an apocryphal story, who knows, but the word itself is pretty unambiguous.
Wait, does that mean that -- outside of a few lip-readable expletives in silent films -- Lugosi was the first person to knowingly use one of George Carlin's "seven words you can't say on TV" in a feature film? If so, that's awesome. (And a split infinitive, but this ain't Latin.)
Oh, and then there's Ava Gardner. Not our type, but beats a screaming skull, I guess.
And boy, was she thrilled to be cast in a Monogram picture!
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