HOLD THAT GHOST (1941)

Following their army comedy Buck Privates, Abbott and Costello’s momentum slumped somewhat in applying the same irreverence to another forces branch with In the Navy, a weaker comedy watered down unhelpfully by matinee idol singer Dick Powell and the Andrews Sisters. Bud and Lou would continually rail against Universal’s incessant watering down of their high-energy funny business with lame love-interest sub-plots and musical interludes. (These got in the way of the Marx Brothers early high-jinx as well). They regained their momentum with their opening flirtation with the spooky in Hold That Ghost, a haunted-house comedy of gangsters and ghouls.

Abbott and Costello play a couple of temporary workers, Chuck and Ferdie, assigned by an agency to a nightclub as relief waiters Jim Mullholland’s book points out that the entire sequence was conceived after the film was shot – an obvious excuse to shoehorn in a couple of those songs that the duo complained about. The Andrews Sisters are pleasant enough crooning ‘Sweet Serenade’ but they are preceded by the top-hat and tails of Ted Lewis who fronts his orchestra with a highly irritating, swooping speak-sung rendition of ‘Me and My Shadow’ that begs for him to be engulfed by it – not to mention the questionable tactic of giving him a black side-kick.

Immediately the twosome fall foul of the frosty Maitre D, Mischa Auer, who’d already parlayed his ‘mad Russian’ persona into a hugely-busy career (last seen here in The Monster Walks - see my earlier review – a stink-bomb that was the first of 16 films IMDB credited him with in 1932 alone). Our first sight of the boys is on their knees in the kitchen playing cards with the other staff. Off-screen, their shared passion for gambling ultimately drained both men of a vast amount of their considerable earnings. Here they have nothing to lose, which doesn’t stop Bud lecturing Lou overbearingly about the correct way to wait on tables. Lou fits comfortably into their established dynamic of being the over-literal, dimwit man-boy. The polished gags work pretty well - Ferdie confuses Chuck’s bullet-point cues of how to convert a customer’s price objection:

‘I oughtta punch you on the nose’

‘If you don’t someone else will’

Ferdie also gauchely misreads a young lady’s secret dinner with a sugar daddy as being his real daughter. American TV stations usually edited out these prologue scenes which is really no-one’s loss.

The real plot begins when Chuck and Ferdie are relegated to gas-station attendants. Ferdie characteristically misunderstands Ethyl as a person not a fuel, reasoning that if a driver asked for it: “I’d tell them it’s her day off”. Public Enemy Number One, gangster Moose Matson (William B. Davidson) pulls in for gas and the boys are swiftly embroiled into driving him through a police-chase that ends with the gut-shot Matson gifting them with his Last Will and Testament. This leads to my favourite gag in the picture: as the solicitor reads the will, instead of being set out in the usual legalese, it is blended with a transcript of Matson’s own Damon Runyon-esque gangster lingo ‘wherein I can’t tell my friends from stoolies, leeches or chisellers’, made funnier by the solicitor’s dead-pan formal delivery.

After it sinks in that Abbott and Costello have inherited Matson’s rural hotel as the last people to have been in contact with him, they are assisted by a colleague of the executor, the shady Charlie Smith played by Marc Lawrence, who lived to the ripe old age of 95, allowing his career to stretch from 1932 to the old motel owner in From Dusk till Dawn and beyond. He makes veiled remarks about how “It’ll be a pleasure to take you boys for a ride”. 

Three Stooges should keep a look-out for Shemp Howard as the sourpuss drug store soda jerk.

Smith sets them up, in more ways than one, with a long cab journey to the hotel that along for the rise picks up other passengers: the prissy health-nut Doctor Jackson (The Creature from the Black Lagoon’s hero, Richard Carlson), love interest Norma Lind (Universal’s horror stalwart Evelyn Ankers) and the stand-out of the ensemble - Joan Davis as Camille Brewster.

Davis is the highlight of the film, a terrific daffy comedienne with a sassy one-of-the-boys manner. Her life was tragically cut short at just 48 from a heart-attack in 1961, followed two years later by a horrific fire that killed her mother, daughter and her two grandsons. Hold That Ghost is a great showcase for how she lit up the screen in her brief life. I’d never seen her work before but she is a wonderful foil to Lou – their pastiche of Fred and Ginger’s effortless elegance dancing to the tune of ‘The Blue Danube’ in the hotel is a genuinely funny set-piece, continually scuppered by collisions and prat-falls. Her character is a radio horror actor much like Bob Hope in the previous year’s The Cat and the Canary and her genre knowledge comes in handy, not to mention a piercingly effective scream. Brewster’s tomboyish charm also helps to offset the developing romance between Dr Jackson and Lind, which to be fair is less intrusive than the usual pace-killing forced romances in comedies.

The hotel provides the familiar old-fashioned tropes of candles, cobwebs, oppressive shadows and bed-sheet spooks for the party to explore. Costello stumbles upon an intriguing feature where his coat-hook trips devices that turn his room into a clandestine casino of Matson’s. Smith is strangled by unidentified hands; his body falls dead into our bumbling hero’s path and yet when the police turn up, the corpse has vanished. The mystery and chills increase with another famous sequence where Ferdie and Camille discuss a map whilst one candle moves by itself across the desk, followed by the other levitating. His reaction each time raises a smile, a panicky speechlessness that can only stutter out as desperate Muttley wheezes till he can finally call out Chuck’s name. (Incidentally, that distinctive high-pitched kiddy voice of Lou’s was a deliberate technique borne of their early radio days when audience’s fed back that they couldn’t tell the duo’s voices apart).

In the climax, Lou discovers that Moose’s name was also a clue to the location of his cash stash, falling out of the stuffed head as he becomes jammed in its maw – “I’ll never join your lodge!” He them does a convinving enough imitation of a police siren to scare off arriving gangsters who were in league with the bent cops. Finally, the boys come full circle, if you’ve seen the uncut film, by owning their own nightclub with the inherited loot and turning the restaurant tables on the Maitre D’ who is now their harassed employee. This becomes a cue for the Andrews Sisters to sing Aurora.

All told, Hold that Ghost is a pretty good rehearsal for Abbott and Costello’s later full-on engagement with horror-comedy raiding the vaults of Universal’s monster Hall of Fame, and put them back on track as they rose to become the most profitable movie comics in the world.