Scared Stiffs
I haven’t been able to find a copy of the original play The Ghost Breaker but it does seem to be a terrible piece of work — trite, racist and structurally malformed. I did find a copy of the novelization, by the original authors, Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard, and it’s unbelievably ill-written. It would take an act of faith of which I am incapable to imagine the theatrical version being greatly better.
As mentioned previously, the two silent versions of the play, one in 1914 directed by Oscar Apfel and Cecil B. DeMille, with the play’s original star, drunken sexy Jesus himself, HB Warner, the other by Alfred E. Green in 1922 with the ill-starred Wallace Reid.
The 1940 one with Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard, Willie Best, and an S on the end is a lot of fun, though West’s characterization and the dialogue Hope is given are racially problematic to say the least. But I’ve just watched SCARED STIFF, the final (to date, and I hope forever) movie adaptation, helmed by the same man who did the Hope picture, George Marshall and starring Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and, somewhat incredibly, Lizabeth Scott and Dorothy Malone.
If I’d seen this as a kid I might have enjoyed Lewis’s clowning more, but I’d have been very annoyed at its failure to even hint at spooky thrills until the last half hour. The splitting of the hero in two (Lewis technically takes the Willie Best role, I suppose, who was always a comedy-relief African American, but now the role must be built up to co-star), the addition of musical numbers for Dino, the shoehorning in of Carmen Miranda and more musical numbers, all retard the action and make the turn to spookiness occur even later in the day than it does in FROM DUSK TILL DAWN.
THE GHOST BREAKERS solved that neatly by opening in a dramatic thunderstorm, and by getting to the haunted Cuban island a bit more briskly. The fifties version establishes itself as a gangster film from the off, undercutting the ghostliness by suggesting a Scooby Doo solution long before it trundles along.
There is some decent slapstick with spaghetti — a long sequence of the maitre d’ following the trail of spilled pasta is funny, and there are signs that it might have gone on even longer and been even better if someone hadn’t taken the shears to it (the sequence, not the spaghetti). Jerry doubles up as his own conscience, emerging from a mirror (inspiring a bit in EVIL DEAD II) and speaking in an eerie low voice that’s very amusing. Hope and Crosby do a cameo as skeletons.
But it isn’t any damn good. Percy Helton turns up but he doesn’t enhance it, or spoil it, he’s just a sort of icky thumbprint on a tablecloth that’s already been vomited over.
SCARED STIFF stars Matt Helm; Buddy Love; Toni Marachek; Princess Querida O’Toole; Emperor Theodosius; Acme Book Shop Proprietress; Ted Barton; Scar; Cecily Young; Mrs. Laurel; Sweetface; Acme Book Shop Proprietress; Scar; Cecily Young; Sweetface; Mrs. Laurel; ‘Painless’ Peter Potter; and Father Chuck O’Malley.
shadowplay 
October 27, 2023 at 8:31 am
GHOST BREAKERS the movie was a follow-up to Hope & Goddard’s CAT AND THE CANARY, itself a remake of a warhorse that left residual DNA in nearly every mystery comedy since.
Hope reacts to the thunderstorm with “Basil Rathbone must be giving a party”. I took it as a reference to Rathbone’s frequent horror / mystery roles and perhaps his pre-Holmes typecasting as a villain. Later read how Mrs. Rathbone was famous in Hollywood for lavish parties, so it might have been an inside joke (or semi-inside for gossip column readers).
Would love a prologue on any of these films where the old millionaire pleasantly and sanely lays out his intentions to his unamused lawyer: Reading has to be at midnight, make the mansion even less accessible than usual, and make sure all the family psychos are there. Oh, there’s a sort of treasure hunt. It won’t end well, but what the hell he’ll already be dead.
October 27, 2023 at 11:02 am
In the ’78 Canary the will is delivered by the deceased, via the first ever talking picture, so we do get a bit more of his motivation in laying out the absurd will.
The Rathbone line is good. The quip directed at Willie Best, “You’re a black out in a blackout” is less emdearing.