THE GHOST TRAIN (1941)

The Ghost Train (1941) is a quaint reminiscence of Agatha Christie’s plays - assembling a cast of strangers in a murder-mystery location (here a spooky British village railway station) and then allowing tension and suspicion to heat up under them till the truth comes out. It was based on a play of the same name by Arnold Ridley best known as Private Godfrey in that most enduring of British war TV sitcoms Dad’s Army. Ironically, his famous role as a dithering conscientious objector was the opposite of his real-life service heroism in both World Wars, sustaining shell-shock in the harrowing trench warfare of the Somme and returning to France in 1939 as a Major in the British Expeditionary Forces.

Ridley wrote the play whilst struggling as an actor between the wars in 1923, inspired by an evening he spent stranded at a train station in Macclesfield where the sound of trains on a nearby line gave him supernatural ideas. He blended a ghost story with espionage intrigue and suddenly found himself a celebrated and rich West End playwright as a result. However, he later lost all his money in a bad film investment and according to his son Nicolas in a 2010 Daily Mail online article: “He made the final mistake of selling the amateur rights of The Ghost Train for £200”, which otherwise would have netted him huge earnings from the countless am-dram productions since.

By the time director Walter Forde shot The Ghost Train in 1941 for British studio Gainsborough Pictures, there were already three versions preceding it: a 1927 German-British version a (currently lost) 1931 remake and one filmed in 1937. The play was retooled for war-time audiences - its original Soviet arms smugglers behind the ghost plot were now modernised to fit topical paranoia about treacherous fifth columnists gun-running for the Nazis. It still plays as something of a time-capsule adding war-time pragmatism yet harking back to subtle pre-war class distinctions in the enforced intimacy of the players thrown together for the night.

The screenplay re-vamping was done by J.O.C. Orton along with dialogue by Marriott Edgar who went on to write films for this chapter’s stable-mate Will Hay, and Val Guest (well-known to horror fans as later director of the first two Quatermass films and The Abominable Snowman for Hammer).

Script-tweaking was done to provide a vehicle for the much-loved comedy team of Arthur Askey (1900-1982) and Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch (1907-1990). Askey was born in Liverpool and after learning the variety skills of British music hall he developed his act in shows during his army service in World War One. Years spent on the concert party circuit led to his famous BBC radio series Band Waggon from 1938 to 1940 partnering him with Murdoch who acquired the nickname ‘stinker’ as a parody of his upper-crust public school and Cambridge education. The show was an anarchic smash hit for the pair, and listeners’ enjoyment of their contrasting voices was augmented when audiences saw them in the flesh for the live London Palladium show and the film released a few weeks before The Ghost Train. Murdoch had a privileged leading man’s tall, clean-cut physique opposite Askey’s diminutive, plain but effervescent cheeky chappy, an irrepressible schoolboy wit in Harold Lloyd round-rimmed spectacles.

Ridley’s spooky play benefits from the twosome straight away. By pulling the communication cord on their train to retrieve his hat from the track – “I lost me titfer!”- Askey establishes himself as an insouciant rule-breaker. The duo meet and good-naturedly duel over Carol Lynne’s comely Joyce Winthrop in her compartment, totally ignoring the chagrin of Richard (Peter Murray-Hill) a posh professional cricketer who may or may not be her protective brother. Askey pulls a marvellous lip-pursing fish impression against the glass to infuriate him and sets about winding Murdoch up into similar snobbish condescension: “I wasn’t talking to you, little man”.

Askey’s part was rewritten as touring variety comedian Tommy Gander (a clear nod to his famous friend Tommy Trinder who’d appeared with Askey and Murdoch in the Palladium show), a perfect showcase for his endlessly chattering repartee and one-liners. He made sure his catch-phrases ‘Hello playmates’ and the immortal ‘Ay thang yew’ were in evidence throughout as well. When the wider group of passengers are stranded overnight at the fog-bound Fal Vale station instead of their Truro destination, it is he who valiantly tries to keep their spirits up and dispel stories of the one that supposedly haunts the location.

The rest of the forced ensemble are made up of a brow-beaten young couple Edna (Betty Jardine) and her soon-to-be husband and gormless drip Herbert (Stuart Latham), the strictly teetotal cockney sparrow Miss Bourne (Kathleen Harrison) complete with parrot straight out of a music hall ditty and a mild-mannered G.P. Dr Sterling played by Morland Graham. They are treated to the gruff non-compliance of the Station Master Saul Hodgkin (Herbert Lomas) who has no choice but to let them wait overnight for a morning train but warns them of the legend of the ghost train that crashed due to a Station Master taken ill just as the bridge needed opening. The hideous tragedy that followed has been marked ever since by a spectral train that no living person should ever witness on pain of sudden death.

For the first half, the group battle on with the business of making tea and trying to get comfortable while Gander entertains them with fate-tempting mockery of the ghost and bad puns: “Why should I catch oldmonia? I’ve had pneumonia”. Then events take a more sinister turn when Hodgkin returns to collapse dead into the waiting room. 

To lighten the mounting excitement for 1940s cinemagoers, comedy soon returns to the foreground; in fact the humour has a naughty censor-baiting dash of the risqué to it, courtesy of Miss Bourne. She goes from life-long temperance to tipsy from a revivifying slug or seven of brandy and injects a welcome sauciness into the ensuing dialogue. “I was not neglected in my youth” she hints to the menfolk in her cups, a gradual slide into sloshed smut headed-off by the delighted Tommy and prompting this priceless banter when he aims to get her innocently into bed:

“Young man, you forget yourself”.

“Young woman, you flatter yourself”.

Two more involuntary guests appear. One is the literally haunted beauty Julia Price (Linden Travers) emotionally scarred into former sanatorium convalescence by an obsession with the ghost myth, In tow is her frosty brother John (Raymond Huntley). In real-life Huntley became somewhat preoccupied with the ghoulish figure of Dracula as he reputedly played the stage role more times than anyone else - from London’s West End to tours of the USA between 1927 and 1930. Only by turning down the Broadway run did he make room for what became a star-making replacement for one Bela Lugosi.

Julia’s appearance is a magnifying glass for a well-handled scene of claustrophobic tension as she believes she can hear the ghost train approaching. The apparition is merely suggested by off-screen sound effects and lighting but creates an intense expectation as it finally roars past. She tears herself way from safety and by smashing a window witnesses the ectoplasmic choo-choo which overcomes her senses in horror.

The release of post-phantom pressure seems to relax everyone’s inhibitions a little further. Askey mischievously skirts the blue-pencil boys with his reference to an Auntie’s flatulence: “Her doors were always blowing open” and even the funereal Herbert lights up his libido at the thought that Edna and he will have to spend a night together without her nightdress: “That’s right” he grins for the first time.

After a second sequence of the tastefully macabre, a wide shot showing Ben Isaacs, apparition of one of the victims, singing ‘Rock of Ages’ as he exits the tunnel, the criminal element is revealed with a judicious bit of gun-play and amateur sleuthing and Blighty is rendered safe once more for the decent little Englander.

The Ghost Train is a restrained, mostly gentle piece of comic spookiness at a time when British audiences were still being protected - from too much horror as a result of strict film censoring dating back to 1934 as well as of course the stark realities of war-time fears. One of its pluses is the way the plot’s siege situation works as a metaphor for the plucky Blitz spirit of WWII, the conflict and rubbing along together across social boundaries in the face of imminent danger. Allowing rich possibilities for character byplay amongst the ensemble, it’s easy to see also why the play is so popular with amateur companies. Although Arnold Ridley missed out on those rewards, he had the comfort of a flickering cathode-ray after-life in the perennial Dad’s Army.

WE WANT OUR MUMMY (1939)

(Abridged web-only version)

It wasn’t until their thirty-seventh film that the Stooges’ chaotic cyclone of destruction encompassed a spooky edge in We Want our Mummy (1939). The hard work and rehearsals put in by the boys was matched with experienced comedy technicians behind the camera. This one was directed Iike many others by their long-time collaborator the Canadian Del Lord who started out directing Keystone Kops’ shorts for fellow Canuck Mack Sennett. The co-writer Elwood Ullman (credited with Searle Kramer) had also written for silent comedy stars Buster Keaton and Charlie Chase among others. In We Want our Mummy, the Stooges take the pith out of the famous Universal horror franchise which until then only comprised the 1931 original – it would not be prised open to begin regenerating until the next year with The Mummy’s Hand.

A basic premise is all the Stooges needed to hit the ground scrapping. Senior staff at the Museum of Ancient History are all a-fluster at the news of the venerable Professor Tuttle (Robert Williams)’s kidnapping. Professor Wilson (James C. Morton) and Dr. Powell (Bud Jamison) fear he is the latest victim of the notorious Curse befalling those who dare to seek the tomb of King RootinTootin. Their erudite research methods don’t seem to extend to background checks in the modern world as they all too willingly hire “the three best investigators in the city” to find him. Enter the Three Stooges backward with a snazzy acapella sales jingle and bearded faces surreally fixed to the backs of their heads. To give credibility they’ve come equipped for the case wearing Sherlock Holmes Deerstalker hats and each sucking one of his signature Meerschaum pipes. Who could resist these super sleuths?  The answer is their new employers, who belatedly realise they’ve made a big mistake: “If the Curse does strike them, it’ll be a blessing to humanity”.

On hearing about the prior search for the King, Curly produces a playing card bearing one from a game. “How’d you know the King was missing?” he asks furtively, earning a combined stomach punch and nose bop from Moe. The inventive gags come thick and fast, paced so there’s never a pause to milk a joke past its due and to maximise the brief running time.

Their response punch-lines in triplicate are well-drilled:

“Gentleman, gentlemen”

(The Stooges whirl round in unison) “Who came in?”

They head to the basement as a logical starting point, which is sheer (dumb) luck as Dick Curtis’s lanky gangster boss has the Professor bound and gagged in a box. Eager-to-please, they assist him by hefting the box onto a getaway truck. The curators offer our men five thousand dollars to go to Cairo after their colleague and the infamous ruler’s tomb. Curly’s coincidental relationship with an uncle who’s a ‘Cairo-practor’ confirms the clients’ pragmatism in dispatching these private dick-heads.

In the Three Stooges comic-strip reality, hailing a Bronx cab will get them there. $2198.55 later, they turn up in the Egyptian desert where Curly flips over in the sand like a baby seal under the influence of a mirage oasis. His invite to the others causes them to dive-bomb through the desert floor into the freakishly fortunate environs of the tomb, suggested ably by hieroglyphics, flaming braziers in the walls and sarcophagi.

The first goose-bump moment for the kiddies comes with the Nosferatu talons of an unknown assailant who abducts Larry and Moe panto-style, leaving the quaking Curly all alone briefly. He encounters a mummy within an upright sarcophagus (Theodore Lorch), who glares at his wittering with an eerie apple-cheeked intensity and an improbably-accented riposte more worthy of Queen’s than kings: ”Dat’s what you t’ink”. A slap-up mix-up ensues when they take out another corpse believed to be RootinTootin but their tubby man-child falls on it, crushing it to ancient dust. This prompts a woo-woo switcheroo forcing Curly to pose as the unlikely well-fed and well-preserved regal remains of the king to prevent the gang leader from killing the Professor. He is at least observant enough to grimace: “Boy, was he homely.”

All is tightly wrapped up by the discovery that the crushed cadaver was not RootinTootin after all but his Queen - HotsyTotsy. A sudden alligator appearance prompts a snappy exit from the Stooges.

We Want our Mummy is a fine jape-fest from Columbia’s Golden Age of classic Stooges two-reelers for when you’re in the mood for humour that’s wild rather than Wilde. Plus the King gets an after-life by later being referenced in Mummy's Dummies (1948) and 1949’s Malice in the Palace.

THE GHOST BREAKERS (1940)

Although 1939 proved to be one of Hollywood’s greatest years for film, producing Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Stagecoach to name but four, it was still a great time to be Bob Hope. He had finally struck comedy gold with audiences and that October embarked on the first of the hugely popular buddy-buddy series with Bing Crosby in Road to Singapore. This crystallised his persona as the conniving coward; the duo played fast and loose with scripts much to the screenwriters’ chagrin, ad-libbing and augmenting the gags with those from his radio team that Hope would come to rely on for decades to come. An improvised irreverent feel came out of the material, allowing Hope to often break the fourth wall with asides to the audience and industry in-jokes. He transferred this quality to the first of his unbeaten nineteen Academy Award ceremony hostings in February 1940, mocking his fellow professionals and edgily re-dubbing the event ‘as it’s known in my house: Passover’.

The double-whammy of his two hit movies in succession put Hope on a studio treadmill of new projects to be mined for all they were worth. The first of these was a canny bid to make lightning strike twice on screen and at the box-office: reuniting him with Paulette Goddard in another remake of another silent murder-mystery comedy – The Ghost Breakers. Like its predecessor. It was adapted from a play, this time by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard. Paramount brought back cinematographer Charles Lang who’d already shown a great understanding of creepy mood lighting with The Cat and the Canary but this time replaced the director. George Marshall was an experienced comedy helmer whose pedigree included a number of Laurel and Hardy shorts, comedy romance (Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart in Destry Rides Again) and would go on to not only direct Hope in the future but also went on to remake this film with Martin and Lewis as Scared Stiff (1953).

Once again, Hope straddles the twin duties of straight lead and light comedian in The Ghost Breakers as ‘Larry’ Lawrence Lawrence (yes, his sadistic parents saddled him thrice), a cynical Manhattan radio gossip broadcaster with an eye for the ladies and a ski-nose for trouble. He spices his shows with racy tidbits about mobsters - “A man who knows all the rackets and all the racketeers” - which they allow except when he gets familiar enough to be a candidate for the cement overshoes. When ‘Frenchy’ Duval (Paul Fix) summons him on the chilling pretext to ‘give it to him straight’, Larry realises that shooting his mouth off may not be the only consequence.

For a smart second opinion, Larry has the advantage of (and over) Willie Best as his black manservant Alex, off whom he bounces reflexive in-jokes such as the ominous weather-inspired: “Basil Rathbone must be giving a party”, referring to Rathbone’s crackling recent horror role in The Son of Frankenstein. At the risk of replaying an over-used record of 1930’s Hollywood racism, the movie’s one retrospective sour note is an especially poorly-judged African-American tokenism in Best’s treatment. Recycling the same dim, wide-eyed deference he was forced to give as the chauffeur in 1932’s dismal The Monster Walks (see earlier review) is bad enough, yet to make matters worse Best’s cowardly gibbering is further demeaned by some atrocious gags at the expense of his colour by the hero. Twice, Hope gets crude laughs from the contrived difficulty of finding Best in the dark: “You look like a blackout in a blackout”. Alex’s function seems to be that of the even greater coward, so by comparison his boss almost looks positively macho. Larry’s lily-livered character quips sit somewhat oddly when closely combined with his terse, authoritative orders to Best, which is a shame as occasionally they hit the mark: “I don’t mind dying but I hate the preliminaries”. The only upside is that the servile role at least gains this minority actor an unusually large amount of supporting screen time as a definite sidekick.

Hope is more blessed by the wisdom to partner him with Paulette Goddard, who repeats her go-getting turn as a relatable streetwise gal, here named Mary Carter, who rolls with life’s punches who finds herself once more inheriting a spooky property, this time a Castillo in Havana’s haunted Black Island, cursed by its infamous Cuban plantations owner’s undead slaves. They meet when Hope panics and lets off a shot in the gangster’s hotel, thinking he’s murdered Ramon Mederos, a young Anthony Quinn. Goddard gamely helps him out by stowing him in her trunk en route to Havana for a ship-bound middle act. This affords a nice sequence showing off Hope’s physical comedy chops as he adjusts haphazardly from crouching to standing again after his lengthy confinement. The chemistry between Hope and Goddard is sweetly conveyed when they playfully pretend-dance together in her room, trading effortless witticisms about imaginary fellow guests.

The last third of the film takes place at the cobwebbed Castillo, suitably Gothic in its dark cavernous layout. Like The Cat and the Canary though, the tone of The Ghost Breakers becomes uneven when finally getting to grips with the ghouls. Hope’s one-liners are weaker, feeling more like flat reactive comments to the unsettling intrigue in a regular horror film than those of a mischievous comedian on fire. He does however demonstrate a topical even-handedness with political gags; after a cheeky dig at his own side in the previous film, he scores with a satirical bullet for the Republicans’ nemeses. When the suave goatee-bearded solicitor Parada (Paul Lukas) warns him about the roaming spectral victims of voodoo:

“…walking around blindly, with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do – not caring…”

“You mean like Democrats?”

We do get a couple of supernatural moments to enjoy while Mary and Larry search for clues to concealed treasure in the mansion. A chest releases the luminous ectoplasmic form of one of Mary’s eighteenth-century ancestors to wander briefly around downstairs while Larry looks on, transfixed. The slightly Disney-fied whimsicality of this is overshadowed by the stronger meat of a bald albino zombie hulk who pursues Mary through the house and inexplicably erupts from within a suit of armour to tussle with Hope. This memorable cameo was played by the imposing Noble Johnson, who had earlier appeared in the horror classics The Mummy (1933) and both of the King Kong films.

Ultimately, as we build to the pay-off, Quinn reappears as his vengeful living twin brother Francisco, a second bite at the cherry that gets little more screen time than his sibling as the sleuthy couple discover the dying Parada. There is then the big reveal of the villain being unmasked as Mary’s scheming friend Geoff.

The Ghost Breakers works sporadically rather than consistently, an accusation that happily could not be levelled at Bob Hope’s future efforts. Whilst war-time movies like these opted for justifiable escapist humour tinged with darkness, in 1941 when America entered WWII he began a staggering 50-year comedic tour of duty flying out to entertain the troops at every international conflict up to the first Gulf War till ill-health curbed his astounding work ethic and he died at the age of exactly 100.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1939)

(Abridged web-only draft)

In April 1939, Bob Hope’s fortunes changed when he began shooting the comedy-horror remake of 1927’s silent The Cat and the Canary. At last, here was a vehicle where the material could begin to show him off as both a film comedy actor and a leading man. The original film had been very successful for Universal whilst they were gearing up for their horror boom beginning with Frankenstein and Dracula in 1931.

Directed by Elliott Nugent who already knew Hope’s style from directing two of his earlier films, The Cat and the Canary is an interesting film in his career trajectory especially for fans who’ve only seen his later movies. They would be constructed around a winning formula - his cowardly lover character partnered with beautiful female co-stars and jabbering his way out of jeopardy with assorted villains - often placing him in period settings for the likes of Monsieur Beaucaire (1946) and The Paleface (1948) for added comedic incongruity. (Woody Allen as a devoted fan would acknowledge borrowing this device for his own early movie comedy protagonists). Here though, Hope is more or less slotted into a pre-defined modern lead role within the Scooby Doo fake-ghost skulduggery recycled from the first version. The light relief part that previously relied on scaredy-cat facial mugging by Creighton Hale was now however bolstered with witty verbal one-liners tailored to Hope’s radio persona and placed him more heroically centre-stage in the main action. In fact, his character Wally Campbell (disparagingly referred to as ‘the original flutterbrain’) is easily remodelled to echo his real-life radio fame.

Playing an actor of radio mystery thrillers also gives Hope license to try out what became his trademark mischievous meta-angle of standing apart from the action as a commentator, second-guessing the horror tropes before they appear and puncturing the macabre atmosphere:

‘Don’t big houses scare you?’

‘Not me. I used to be in vaudeville’.

From his first entrance, through the excellently-realised misty Louisiana bayou, Hope is already making with the funnies. He yacks incessantly to the sombre Native American Creole Indian who paddles him toward the deceased Cyrus Norman’s estate. Whilst his guide of course is ignorant of Wally’s work, he dead-pans knowing the real source of his passenger’s gags as Jack Benny – a nice in-joke reference to their shared real-life similarity that allegedly was one of the reasons Paramount nearly let Hope go the previous year.

Amongst the co-stars to our reluctant hero is the imperious estate housekeeper Miss Lu, an enigmatic portrayal of sinister poise by Anthony Adverse Academy-Award winner Gale Sondergaard. Reminiscent of a young beautiful Frau Bluecher, Sondergaard had the gift of projecting a cold sexuality that actually bagged her the Wicked Witch role in that year’s The Wizard of Oz but she rejected it over concerns that the make-up would require her to be rendered distastefully ugly. 

To reinforce the horror credentials further we have on board George Zucco, recognisable to genre fans for a very busy war during which he appeared as Professor Moriarty opposite Rathbone and Bruce in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), three of Universal’s The Mummy sequels, House of Frankenstein (1944) and others for the ‘House of Horror’. The British-born Zucco makes a fine Mr Crosby, the gravely serious executor of the Norman estate and protector of the heir.

In the cross-hairs of the scheming disinherited other family members, Crosby defends to the death the personable Paulette Goddard as Joyce Norman. Goddard was a former Ziegfield showgirl who enchanted Charlie Chaplin so much that he married her and cast her in the lead role of an orphan girl in her first film Modern Times (1936). She took the part of Joyce while waiting for Chaplin to begin production of his dark satire masterpiece The Great Dictator (1940) and matches Hope’s energy and pizzazz as Joyce with a believable chemistry of affection befitting their background as old high school friends. One day when Goddard’s husband visited the set having already seeing rushes of shot scenes, Chaplin was likewise entranced enough by the star-struck Hope to tell him: “I want you to know that you are one of the best timers of comedy I have ever seen”.

What makes Hope’s work in The Cat and the Canary surprising is that particularly in the second half the demands of playing the plot’s straight leading man at times take over from his amusing one-liners. When Elizabeth Patterson’s spiteful spinster Aunt Susan prattles self-servingly about Joyce’s precarious mental state, it’s quite a shock to hear the playful gag-meister suddenly round on her: “Shuddup” he spits, threatening her with the steel of a hardened Warner Brothers’ gangster.

This is not to say that Hope’s wise-cracking is completely submerged. He commits to the fun of the irrepressible survivalist coward that audiences grew to love over the years, such as when he and Nydia Westman’s Cicily go to investigate the dark cellar. Eschewing male posturing, he tries to pass off his unmanly fear as good manners: “Ladies always go first”. There’s also a little topicality to his zingers. The man who would become famous as a clubby political conservative finds time amid the chills to poke fun at his fellows in response to a line about the dead coming back to life: “You mean like the Republicans?”

Director Nugent and cinematographer Charles Lang supply the requisite eeriness of tone, re-staging the famous shot of the phantom hand looming over Goddard’s imperilled heiress in bed, the cut-out eyes in the painting and great use of shadows. The escaped asylum lunatic (nicknamed the Cat) is teased as a crouching bestial silhouette. Better yet, check out the highly effective climactic shot as he terrorises Joyce, his body shrouded in darkness but for a strip of light across his eyes as his switchblade flicks open.

As with the original, the prowling killer is exposed as the handsome Charles (Douglass Montgomery), who’d hoped to scare his way to the estate, the valuable family necklace and Joyce until blown away by the frighteningly resourceful Miss Lu and her shotgun.

The Cat and the Canary became a huge and important hit for Bob Hope, proving that he could talk big as the blustering fraidy-cat yet play it small enough with a subtle film actor’s learned technique. It placed him in the front rank of box-office stars that would continue almost uninterrupted beyond the real horrors of the Second World War. 

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1939)

Following his rejuvenating effect on one franchise as the Baron in Son of Frankenstein, Basil Rathbone began another by going straight into this excellent adaptation of Conan-Doyle’s most famous Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles. Not only has this tale become the most-filmed version over the decades, Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as his doctor sidekick Watson are arguably the most well-known pairing of the duo on film, making a total of 13 films between 1939-1946

Rathbone gives Holmes a precision and authority, coupled with a hint of more warmth than his creator bestowed on him, to humanise what would otherwise be an intellectual remoteness difficult for audiences to take to. Some fans of Conan-Doyle have been critical of Bruce’s slightly woolly duffer of a sidekick, taking issue with an interpretation that doesn’t reflect his battle-hardened background as an ex-military assistant surgeon wounded in the field, nor credits him overly with undoubted intelligence. However, Bruce is an avuncular, personable contrast to Holmes and represents the audience in needing to have the lightning-fast superhuman deductions of Holmes explained along the way. His is also more of a rounded character than the enigmatic narrator function Watson has in the original stories.

20th Century Fox mounted The Hound with decent sets and a quality cast whilst commendably cleaving to the Victorian era in which the story is set instead of the then-modern setting as previous versions presented. Working with a script by Ernest Pascal, the director Sidney Lanfield was an ex-vaudeville performer and jazz musician who transferred his light touch to directing comedies for the studio through the Thirties. After this most successful film of his, in the Forties he went on to helm the Fred Astaire vehicle You’ll Never Get Rich and a string of popular comedies with fellow Vaudevillian Bob Hope.

The plot concerns the arrival back to British shores of Sir Henry Baskerville from Canada who is to take up his inheritance of Devonshire’s Baskerville estate providing he can live long enough to enjoy it. In advance of his visit, Lionel Atwill makes a welcome appearance as Dr Mortimer, friend to Sir Henry’s late uncle, who unburdens his fears to Holmes and Watson that the family curse of the Hound of the Baskervilles will see Sir Henry savaged by the ferocious dog on the Moors that first killed Sir Hugo Baskerville (Ralph Forbes) centuries before – told to us in flashback. The curse is said to take the lives of all successive heirs to the estate. (In real life, Atwill was to find within the next year that he would be cursed himself by the ruinous sex scandal already covered within my earlier writings that would subsequently wreck his career).

Richard Greene is a pleasant enough, handsome Sir Henry and here capitalised on his heart-throb status as a Fox star that would later make him famous on TV in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955- 59). He actually took top billing in the film over Rathbone since the studio at first had no idea how popular the Sherlock Holmes series would become. Wendy Barrie, notable as a romantic leading lady of the period, was credited above Nigel Bruce as Sir Henry’s love interest Beryl Stapleton.

The pacing is good and the Moors are impressively realised with a realistic depth of perspective and atmospheric layering of fog. We also benefit from a suitable fierce, fang-baring Great Dane as the titular Hound. Aside from Atwill, another horror alumni (fleetingly seen as a cruel hunter hounding Karloff in a different sense in Bride of Frankenstein) is John Carradine as Barryman the butler – changed from Barrymore for the film to avoid comparisons with John Barrymore He would make his mark in horror movies across future decades in a hugely prolific career of roughly 350 credits.

Intriguingly for those new fans unfamiliar with this particular tale, Holmes vanishes for the whole of the middle act on the pretence of being too busy. He does however accord us an enjoyable cameo of his and Rathbone’s character-acting skills when he pops up in the vivid guise of a travelling old Devonshire hawker of musical instruments.

Eventually we discover that the curse is nothing more than a ruse cooked up by the family’s dastardly cousin Stapleton, played by Morton Lowry, who had trained the killer dog to help him dispatch all the other heirs in his master-plan to gain an unfettered claim on the estate’s title. He flees across the Moors, which we learn from Holmes won’t help him as there are alerted police lying in wait. 

Lowry would return near the end of the series in another role as a Steward in the sea-going Pursuit to Algiers.

THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG (1939)

“Though my life be taken, my work will not be left undone”

In August 1939 Columbia Pictures released The Man They Could Not Hang, a mad scientist movie assisted by a handful of excellent performances and a slightly less two-dimensional motive for the medical scheming. Directed by Nick Grinde who’d co-written Laurel and Hardy’s Babes in Toyland (1934), Boris Karloff plays Dr Henryk Savaard, pioneer of a mechanical heart invention. As he’s inventing this on the quiet due to the ethics of revivification of the dead, he enlists a healthy medical student to volunteer to be induced into death on the operating table and then revived with the new test heart. While Savaard assures her that every precaution is being taken and her beau is fully on-board with the plan, his girlfriend Betty (Ann Doran) has other ideas: “Don’t you realise he’s going to kill you? You’re going to die!”

Since alarmism seems to have no effect, Betty goes to the cops who raid the laboratory, causing her man to die mid-operation before life can be restored. In the ensuing trial, Savaard’s kindly bedside manner is replaced by the wrath of his denied underlying God complex. He castigates her meddling as “the treachery of a stupid woman” but saves his bitterest denouncements for the judge and jury for seeking to kill a man: “whose only offence is to bring life to darkness”. Karloff gives a strong and impassioned performance as usual, transitioning from sincere and well-meaning to full-throttle megalomania without descending into ham. We are in doubt though that the medical gloves will be off if he gets his chance to be revenged upon his executioners.

Sure enough, that opportunity comes courtesy of his assistant Lang, the immensely-busy character actor Byron Foulger who is equally as intense and convincing as Karloff. Under the radar, he is permitted to get consent from Savaard to donate his body to science, which means his mentor will become his own guinea-pig for the revolutionary surgery. Savaard goes from Death Row to escaping from Death Valley post-hanging by successfully being operated upon by Lang. His last words before execution - “Though my life be taken, my work will not be left undone” – ring true as he schemes to be revenged on those who killed him.

Scoop Foley (Robert Wilcox) is a wiley reporter who spots a connection between a rash of six suicides-by-hanging breaking out over the city. His editor misses the homicide angle, preferring to dream up sensational headlines about a Savaard curse. Foley knows better, but not quite enough to realise that a mysterious party he gate-crashes is a deliberate ploy by Savaard to gather together the judge, prosecuting District Attorney and all the jurors who sent him to the noose. Here the plot echoes 1934’s The Ninth Guest (reviewed earlier on my site) in its conceit firstly of the villain turning into a disembodied voice informing his guests of their inability to avoid being gradually killed off one by one – and the device of the electrified shutter which claims the life of the judge, his first victim.

There’s a neat reversal by Savaard’s beloved daughter Janet (Lorna Gray) who, in attempting to force her father to release the remaining guests, threatens to fry herself on the shutter – thus willingly giving her father power over her life and death against his will. Sadly, her bluff is called and she dies. In his grief, Savaard once more uses his technology to revive her. However, he is struck by a very last-minute (of the film) attack of conscience and in shooting a hooked-up flask of serum ruins his own handiwork for the last time.

By now, despite being ever-grateful for the boost to his career caused by recognition in the horror genre, the limits of the association were beginning to tell on him. He told the Los Angeles Times during the filming that although he was a gentle who loved his garden and animals: “What does it get me? Queer stares from strangers and even more unusual glances from friends. Every time I walk into a room, there is a noticeable lull in the merrymaking.” 

Karloff would go on to enjoy another three decades of longevity in Hollywood regardless of this perceived downside of his position...

THE LIVE GHOST (1934)

By 1934, Laurel and Hardy were coming to the end of their hugely popular run of short films and were about to branch out into long-form features. The Live Ghost, released that December, showcased a number of the much-loved repertory company of supporting actors they’d built up over the years in a fun farce of mistaken ghostly identity.

Directed by fellow Brit, Birmingham's Charles Rogers, it first allows us to enjoy Walter Long, one of their arch enemies, as a fearsome sea captain whose vessel has an even worse reputation (for being ‘aunted’). Long always played the tough grizzled villain, belying his real-life warmth and had come to Hal Roach Studios via film roles for D.W. Griffith -notoriously as Gus, an African-American bad guy in the ill-conceived Birth of a Nation (1915), the Musketeer of the Slums in Intolerance (1916) and three of Rudolph Valentino’s brief run of box-office hits.

Stan and Ollie are idly fishing on the dockside when Long offers them crewing on his ship. Wisely they demur although not from fear of him but of sharks - Stan hearing that the sea is ‘infatuated’ with them and Oliver correcting him that the correct term is ‘infuriated’. Numbskull heads prevail and they agree to Long instead paying them a dollar a head to shanghai other sailors from the local dive. 

This becomes a passport to the bar scenes where Stan places bets with gullible sea-dogs that an egg can’t be held in the mouth without breaking it. The resulting swallow caused by a fist to the chin gets him chased out to a waiting frying-pan bop from Ollie. One of the wilier pub denizens is another welcome face, Charlie Hall, a slightly awkward performer but a vivid opposing force for them as various cuckolded husbands, an exasperated ice-cream parlour employer and then his eye-for-an-eye vengeful business competitor in the following month’s famous Tit for Tat (1935). Here he gets the better of Ollie when he switches con-artist places with Stan, causing all three (plus Long) to get hit outside.

The nitwit pair awake to find themselves equally press-ganged on-board ship amongst some understandably bitter new workmates and the captain’s threat to turn any crew-member’s head 180 degrees if they utter the word ‘ghost’ again. None of this fazes the marvellously sozzled Arthur Housman (Hollywood’s go-to for comic drunk parts). He manages to be just sober enough to fool Stan and Ollie, threatened by Long into babysitting him, into thinking he’s abed while he tops up his alcohol stream on shore. A fall into a vat of paint gives Housman a full-body white spectral appearance which cues up ghostly chills for Laurel and Hardy back on board.

Meanwhile there’s a disappointingly brief two-scene cameo from Mae Busch whose hard-bitten sassy persona almost makes a perfect match for Long were it not for an unexpected reunion with her husband in the form of Houseman. The pleasurable chills are rounded off by Long making good on his threat when the boys excuse their incompetence.

As Laurel and Hardy retire to bed with their heads facing the opposite way to their nightshirts, so must we from their delightful company – making way for other notable comedy teams of the pre-war period to do their best in picking up the baton of comic-horror.

DIRTY WORK (1933)

In November 1933, Laurel and Hardy released another cracking mad scientist-themed short directed by Lloyd French and written by H.M. ‘Beanie’ Walker. They play a couple of chimney sweeps hired to work in the home of the highly-eccentric Professor Noodle, the hugely memorable Lucien Littlefield who’d already earned his kooky comedy spurs as the Doctor in The Cat and the Canary (1927).  

Right from the special-effect opening credits featuring a bubbling conical flask, and tracking in to Noodle's desk of complicated experimental paraphernalia, we know we're in the presence of the archetypal batty boffin we all know and love. Noodle has the smoking jacket of the gentleman and the perched pince-nez of the scholar, coupled with a tufty, almost bald head and a look of maniacal determination as he stirs the tall frothing liquid. His long-suffering butler Jessop (Samuel Adams) has spent twenty years hearing him declaim his eternal youth goal with 'just a few drops' of his serum. Noodle's boasting is aptly punctured with a mischievous cuckoo effect followed by the doorbell.

As Stan and Ollie enter and begin to elaborately destroy the house, Noodle delights in his list of nonsensical ingredients to be added. An unfortunate adult duck subject is placed into a bathtub for the final test, and with a single serum drop from a teat pipette, the water boils like a jacuzzi resulting in the duck reverting to a cute little duckling. This causes the 'good' doctor to perform a madcap jig of celebration around the room, a wonderfully bizarre high-point of Littlefield's performance. He bursts with such infectious joy that he can barely contain himself in front of the boys in a glorious display of deliriously-committed ham. Littlefield’s cry of exultation that the greatest scientific breakthrough of the age is 'Mine! All mine!' is seamlessly followed by his hilariously un-self-conscious insane cock-crowing sound. His triumphant excitement is such that after he leaves the room with the boys in eager pursuit, he can't resist turning back on them to re-enter with a full-throated cackle. Savour the crackling voltage of a madcap actor who can single-handedly pull the focus from both Laurel and Hardy.

Our be-sooted pair are then shown a continuation of the previous experiment where the poor duck's bio-markers are now further reversed to the form of an egg. With a surprisingly uncharacteristic burst of self-preserving intelligence, Ollie reacts to this with an upbeat 'Well, be seeing you!' Inevitably while the Professor exits to find his butler, Stan and Ollie get busy with the fizzy, using a heroic dose that reduces poor Ollie to an impossibly retrograde self: a chimp.

Dirty Work is a fast-paced favourite of many (myself included) - and a neat, concentrated injection of inspired medical mayhem.

HABEAS CORPUS (1928)

Laurel and Hardy's wonderful short subject plots could be based around any single idea no matter how outlandish, from the sophisticated body-swap of playing each other’s wives in Twice Two and devilish baby versions of themselves in Brats, to a ‘simple’ premise like leaving home in time for a wedding or just leaving home, period, in Perfect Day. Along the way, they cleverly gave the laughs an extra frisson by battling such darker forces as vengeful villain Walter Long and scorned harpie Mae Busch

The first Laurel and Hardy short to inspire ghoulish guffaws was Habeas Corpus (1928) which has the unique distinction of two Oscar-winning directors behind it.  As well as Leo McCarey, who insisted he mostly wrote for them and here is credited as ‘Supervising Director’, James Parrott went on to helm many of their classics like The Music Box in 1932 (and also their next horror-comedy after this, The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case).

Strictly speaking Habeas Corpus is a silent film, but for fans accustomed to their later ones it feels very much like a sound film with the sound-track removed and replaced with an orchestra plus added whistles, wood-blocks and other effects. The inciting protagonist is the balding mad scientist Professor Padilla (Richard Carle) who follows in a long line of horror movie medical whackos with his experiment to prove ‘That the human brain has a level surface – in some cases practically flat’. The irreverent H.M. Walker is the wit behind the titles though such is the strength of the sight-gags to come that he’s barely needed.

The Professor needs the help of enterprising idiots who can provide him with a body from a little nocturnal grave-robbing. As if by tragic, without seeing them we get a lovely visual clue as to who the prospective Burke and Hare will be: a close-up of a prissy hand dismissing that of another person to take over knocking on the door. It is Stan and Ollie, ever ready to bypass common sense in favour of ready money, in this case $500 for the job. Little do they know, even less than usual, that the butler is an undercover policeman by the name of Ledoux – very likely an in-joke reference to Inspector Ledoux in Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera that we covered earlier. Charley Rogers in the role would work with Laurel and Hardy many more times over the years.

The police seize the nutty professor while the boys head to work. Along the way, Stan shows rare powers of perception in suggesting their employer might be ‘a trifle cuckoo’ – emphasised by a cuckoo FX cue. Ollie reminds us that the pair’s partnership extends to sharing the one brain by assuring him: ‘He is as sound mentally as you or I’.

The boys head for the graveyard where As usual even getting into the graveyard isn’t simple for those simple in mind. After wet paint shenannigans, they spend over three minutes in increasingly haphazard and funny bids just to get Stan hoisted over the wall by Ollie. Once in though, it may not be gruesome for the twosome yet their night-shift becomes hair-raising courtesy of a seemingly ghostly wandering lamp (placed on a nearby tortoise by Stan), a rubber bat that may be related to the unconvincing flapper seen in Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula and the close surveillance by Ledoux that turns him into a running smokey spectre to terrorise our heroes.

The pace is excellent and the high gag-rate sustains throughout. Look out for Ollie’s demonstration of how to properly use your friend to scale a wall – or in his case utterly demolish it – one of their sublime moments of destruction that always deserves a rewind. There’s even a nice possible nod to Buster Keaton in the way that Ledoux, bagged by mistake, pokes his legs through Stan’s hefted sack and walks behind him in perfect sync. 

Habeas Corpus is a great example of a comedy team adding a touch of spookiness to a short, exploiting a single idea, playing on its main characters’ relationship and sustaining the chaos to the end. From here, audiences would now be able to hear their mirthful exchanges as well as see them...

THE MONSTER (1925)

 At the age of 40 Lon Chaney was at last a deserved superstar, but with his long-ingrained work ethic there was to be no complacency.  He turned his laser focus to craft a customary self-created make-up for the flamboyant, disfigured Erik in The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the world’s most pro-active opera critic and the second of his double-whammy of parts that catapulted him to the front rank of esteemed Hollywood actors. The Phantom’s look became one of the most famous Hollywood ‘monster’ roles - and partly inspired Batman artist Bob Kane in creating the face of the Joker, an even more iconic mix of terror and the blackest of humour.

Obviously in a busy schedule no performer can guarantee the highest quality in every project they agree to and this was the case in Chaney’s next role, a botched blend of horror and dark humour in The Monster, released by director Roland West’s production company with Tec-Art and distributed by M-G-M. This may have given the mistaken impression it was an M-G-M film but it lacked the talent of such a prestigious studio. The Monster had an intriguing premise to attract Chaney, that of a former surgeon of repute, Dr Gustave Ziska, who takes over the sanatorium asylum in which he is revealed to actually be one of its insane patients. However, we have to wait over thirty minutes for him to appear whilst we tread water through a convenience store love-triangle between Amos Rugg (Hallam Cooley), Gertrude Olmstead as the owner’s daughter Betty and Johnny Goodlittle - Johnny Arthur, who was better suited to noted effeminate roles than these lame heroics. The title cards aim for wry laughs and miss with tepid remarks such as deriding Amos who ‘Blew into town – and has been blowing ever since’.

Investigating the disappearance of a wealthy farmer, correspondence-course detective Johnny goes to the sanatorium along with Betty and Amos to search for clues. Chaney makes a darkly suave entrance as Dr Ziska, with white hair and fluffy eccentric white eyebrows concealing mangled teeth whilst sporting a frock coat and affecting a cigarette-holder like a sinister Noel Coward. Another attempt at quality by association is naming his servant as Caliban (Walter James), Shakespeare’s primitive man-servant from The Tempest – although here James' oiled bare-chest and ear-ring suggest more a gypsy circus artist. Chaney commands as much as he can but the material allows him no chance to be Prospero here and the outside torrent fails to remind us this is no more than a storm in a teacup.

Our three heroes survive fiendish traps laid by Ziska and his other henchmen, Knute Ericksen’s Daffy Dan and the mad monk Rigo played by George Austin. Amongst these distractions, a  couple of brief high-points are the sight of Betty saved from being crushed by a mechanical weight only to be gripped by unidentified hands as her bed retracts to unseen depths, while Amos is about to be clobbered from behind by the fearsome friar before a cut to black.

By the time Johnny finds the asylum’s owner Dr Edwards (Herbert Prior) and the missing farmer, we are given the big reveal of Ziska’s true status, yet truthfully we are past caring as the plot descends into standard mad scientist hack work. “At last, the fools have brought me a woman!” crows Ziska over Betty, strapped to an operating table. He is about to experiment on her to crack the old chestnut of the secret of life – “Rigo – my knives!”- yet instead is forced into his own ‘death-chair’ by Caliban and mercifully Chaney is electrocuted out of the movie. It only remains for Johnny to hoist Caliban up, ready-trussed for the police.

A clunky epilogue has Betty and Johnny together in a car. She stares up at him doe-eyed in admiration with the line “How can I ever be worthy of a wonderful man like y’all?” This reads like a weak parody of Deep South folks but at least serves to remind us that The Monster ultimately isn’t worthy of us nor Lon Chaney...

DR PYCKLE AND MR PRYDE (1925)

As an individual, Stan Laurel often played belligerent, highly-physical characters eager to spoil for a fight - quite a departure from the milder persona he would later contrast with the overbearing Hardy. He’d been having combative relationships off-screen as well, going back and forth from working for Hal Roach to leaving him again temporarily for producer Joe Rock over a money dispute. During a prolific burst of creativity churning out twenty-four shorts across 1924 to 1925, one of the twelve he made for Rock was another direct spoof of the various versions of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Dr Pyckle and Mr Pride is a surprisingly funny and exuberant gem. Part of the fun is the wit of Tay Garnett’s many title cards undermining both the period and the characters from the novel with a modern subversiveness. Author Robert Louis Stevenson’s meditation on the fear of evil overcoming good, echoed in the 1920 film’s ‘In each of us,two natures are at war – the good and evil’ - is here considered with such repercussions as ‘Even saxophone players would be tolerated’. Dr Stanislaus Pyckle’s high reputation precedes him – ‘Heaven knows why’.

We then meet Laurel’s Dr Pyckle pacing the floor of his laboratory while a quartet of learned colleagues hang on his pronouncements, apparently bored, awaiting his divine inspiration. His pince-nez glasses, slicked-back hair and dark lips contrast starkly with his blue eyes. Even more striking than his appearance is the rare chance to see Laurel taking a high-status role. He is a strutting peacock of Victorian intellectual pomposity, not the famously meek dimwit we love. The main pleasure of the film is actually watching Stan clearly enjoying himself in the dual title role wherein he’s equally funny as both halves. Whereas Lloyd, always a serious actor playing comedy, used a crack team of gag-men and a sober analytical mind to create the architecture of funny from the ground up, Laurel gives all the appearance of being allowed to just turn instinctively as the camera turns over. As with Jim Carrey, the joy is in his unfettered creativity in the moment. As Pyckle, pre-Pryde, he is firing on all cylinders in his facial expressions dealing with his colleagues and Julie Leonard as his assistant.

The bonus, for those who’ve seen it, is in the mischievous lampooning of the most respected film remake starring illustrious stage star John Barrymore. In the main, the greatest Hamlet of his era was highly convincing as Hyde and channelled his performance with an impressive lack of prosthetics (other than extended phalanges and a late-revealed pointy skull). Barrymore’s wickedness though is matched by Laurel’s in mocking ‘the Great Profile’s slightly over-wrought metamorphosis into his alter-ego. Instead of his forerunner’s grasping of the throat and writhing, it is Pyckle’s legs that become supernaturally possessed after he downs what looks like a milkshake (Pyckle’s ‘58th variety’ spoofing Heinz’s 57 varieties) . He wobbles spaghetti-legged, kicks and spins laughably before throwing himself out of the window to land in a match-cut to a dummy that rivals Benny Hill for comedy obviousness.

Surrounded by suitable period detail and costumes, from here Laurel hits the ground running, or rather squatting in mimicry of Barrymore’s bent-legged Hyde stride. He takes the physical absurdity further still by bouncing up and down on the spot like a frog when in the throes of maniacal glee. To top off the imitation, he reproduces Barrymore’s long dark wig and wide-eyed stare but exaggerates his mouth into a permanently demented grin. Stan’s comically evil Pryde is rendered by a skilled transformative performance just as free of external make-up aids as his dramatic rival.

Where the comparison ends is in the bad self’s intention. Laurel spares us the slumming in dubious adult penny-gaffs for this demon, rubbing shoulders and other body parts with the lower orders like previous iterations. Mr Pryde is the amusing living embodiment of Pyckle’s child-like mischief, a Lord of Misrule more innocent than homicidal. Instead of the hideous trampling of the book’s small child, we get the stealing of his ice-cream cone; a woman is frightened by Pryde bursting a paper-bag behind her back.

More cheeky spoofings of the 1920 version abound. Whereas Hyde attempts to ingratiate himself with a flower delivered to a young man at her door, Pryde embarrasses her by converting it into a party streamer blown in her face. The ground-breaking dissolve-shots of Barrymore’s metamorphosis are comically copied. Whereas Jekyll’s smooth hand is shown in close-up gradually becoming that of the gnarled Hyde, Pyckle’s hilariously morphs into low-budget pen daubings over his knuckles and veins.

Laurel’s team also add their own ideas, extending Pyckle’s repeated accident-prone spilling of acid to the consequences if his dog was to eat food dripped upon by it. The result is the perfectly deadpan re-appearance of the pooch in his own fright-wig, forcing Pyckle to try concealing him against his colleagues suspecting his connection to the bestial murderer.

The ending varies slightly according to different surviving prints. There is a nineteen and a half-minute version attributed to director Percy Pembroke (or Joe Rock and Scott Pembroke according to some sources) which ends with Stan’s advance on Leonard being met with a vase cracked over his head. Also there exists a two minutes-longer version (approved by a display card of the old British Board of Film Censors), directed by Harry Sweet, whereby after her rebuttal Mr Pryde loops himself intimately under Leonard’s necklace while his learned colleagues clamour outside for him – which then cuts inconclusively to an end piano credit.

Dr Pyckle and Mr Pryde was the only comedy-horror send-up that Stan Laurel experimented with alone. The theme of split-personality extremes would however be mined repeatedly in his future partnership with Hardy – for example his concussion-inspired transformation into posh Lord Paddington in A Chump at Oxford, his sudden bass (then female) crooning of ‘The Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ in Way Out West after Ollie coshes him with a mallet – and the unsettlingly funny playing of each other’s wives in Twice Two.

What may also have inspired Stan during Dr Pyckle was the two conflicting faces of the public and private he had to wear during its making owing to debilitating domestic battles fought with his own common-law wife Mae Dahlberg. Simon Louvish’s invaluable biography Stan and Ollie: The Roots Of Comedy documents how Stan was forced after their vaudeville act ended to include Mae in his films despite her limitations of talent and looks compared to the belles of the day like Mabel Normand. He strained relations with his bosses by having her co-star status written into his contracts but ‘Behind the scenes, this clash of wills, and Mae’s delusions of stardom ate away at the foundations of the non-marriage, the ‘gentlemanly’ deal between Mae and Stan’.

Soon, with the dissolving of Stan’s ties to Mae, his happiest of collaborations was to come. In early 1925 Oliver Hardy came to work for the Hal Roach studio. Now Laurel and Hardy’s paths would properly narrow to a comic collision of history-making movies together that would be their real lasting legacy eclipsing all their individual work.

THE GHOST BREAKER (1922)

During the Golden Age of silent shorts, there were a few examples of feature-length comedies tinged with frissons of horror, though sadly their number is further diminished by being lost like many films of the era. One of them was The Ghost Breaker in 1922, a haunted-house comedy made by Famous Players-Lasky before it merged into Paramount. It starred matinee-idol Wallace Reed who was a leading man of over 100 shorts as well as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). The source was a stage play by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard and was first filmed as a serious version in 1914 by another Hollywood directing giant, Cecil B. De Mille.

According to the website of the AFI (American Film Institute), the plot revolves around Warren Jervis (Reed) who escapes his Kentucky family’s feud straight into aiding Lila Lee as Maria Theresa in ridding her father’s castle from ghosts and finding treasure along the way. The spirits turn out to be a ruse by her dastardly neighbour the Duke D’Alva (Arthur Edmund Carewe) to claim both the trove and her. Little else is known other than the cast and a poster which bears demoralising evidence of more sinister masquerading within the film. The bottom right-hand corner shows another recurring ghastly spectre of the period - the wide-eyed, cowardly black servant, here dressed like an awful golliwog of British comedian Max Miller. It's debatable which is worse - the casting of black actors in such demeaning roles which had the dubious benefit to them of providing work, or the fact that this example was actually a white billed co-star -Walter Hiers - in minstrel black-face.

Jervis and Theresa at least end the picture happily together. This was tragically not the case in real-life for Reed who tragically died later that year aged only 31 from a morphine addiction resulting from pain-management he’d taken to treat his injuries from a 1919 train crash. The film’s legacy was happier for Reed’s co-stars. Shortly before The Ghost Breaker’s release the smash-hit Blood and Sand opened, a more effective career boost for Lee and the sensationally popular Rudolph Valentino. Equally, Carewe would do himself more favours in the purer horror genre as Secret Policeman Inspector Ledoux in Lon Chaney’s 1925 Phantom of the Opera.

The Ghost Breaker generated even more of an after-life for itself in the coming decades of horror-comedy. Felix the Cat tried his paws at ghost-busting in the animated short Felix the Ghost Breaker (1923) before live-action would wake the dead with mainstream star vehicles for Bob Hope in 1940’s hit remake The Ghost Breaker and the double-act of Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin in 1953’s Scared Stiff (both being covered here anon...)