Review of Ghosts on the Loose (1943) by Edith N — 24 Jul 2011

Probably More Integrated Than Most of the Theatres It Played In.

For some reason, we don't much get comedy teams anymore. I'm vaguely disappointed by this. Oh, we get people who work together a lot, but that's different. In the Old Days, you had the East Side Boys, featuring actors who had been Dead End Kids and Little Tough Guys (plus a member or two of Our Gang) and who would go on to be Bowery Boys. There were the Marx Brothers and the Ritz Brothers. Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and even Martin and Lewis, toward the end of the phenomenon. They all had a shtick of some kind, roles they played every time, and it was safe to say that if you liked the humour of one movie, you'd like the others, too. If you've been on the [i]Road to Singapore[/i], why not continue and take the [i]Road to Rio[/i]? It was Bing Crosby and Bob Hope bickering over Dorothy Lamour every time. It seems funny to lament some of the most formulaic movies ever made, but a lot of them were still good!

This one . . . well. Glimpy (Huntz Hall) is to be the best man when his sister, Betty (Ava Gardner), marries Jack (Rick Vallin). Jack has even managed to buy a house in the suburbs, but there's something odd about it. He is told, in fact, that it is haunted and that no decent man would bring his new bride back to a haunted house! So okay, he agrees with that, and maybe a quick trip to Niagara Falls is in order while he arranges to sell the house and buy a new one. But Glimpy and his friends, led by Mugs (Leo Gorcey), don't know about the whole "haunted" thing and decide that Jack must somehow be ashamed of the house, which he says needs fixing up. So the guys agree to fix it up as a surprise to the newlyweds. Only for wacky reasons, they end up in the wrong house, because it's apparently the wrong house which is said to be haunted. Or something. Anyway, there are wacky hijinks.

Let's be honest. These are familiar wacky hijinks. Probably half the people I named up there have encountered them. Someone, in this case Bela Lugosi, is faking the haunting of a house so no one will go near it, allowing in this case Bela Lugosi to perpetrate a crime, in this case printing illicit Nazi propaganda, without anyone's being the wiser. It's worth noting that, in these movies, everyone believes in ghosts except the characters you're supposed to be laughing at for their stuffiness. As odd as it is to think that Jack is bringing his new bride back to the house sight unseen, it's even weirder to think that he can be talked into selling it by a claim that it's haunted. He isn't even a little suspicious about the motivations of the person making the claim, which you'd think he would be. But no, we have to have things appearing and disappearing, and we have to have secret passages. And so forth. We have a pattern here, and there's no getting around that by the simple application of logic.

This is actually the second movie I've watched today from the same year--I don't have much to say about [i]Destination Tokyo[/i] other than "look, that's Cary Grant in a submarine"--and it rather shows the limitations the studios were working under at the time. They were limited in resources, and most of their leading men were off at war. (Cary Grant was considered too old and too valuable to the war effort because he was raising money and morale.) Ava Gardner is, here, in her first credited role, and while Rick Vallin worked steadily for twenty years, it wasn't much in things anyone has heard of. To the extent that one of his "known for" movies on IMDB doesn't even have the poster displayed. Bela Lugosi ([i]way[/i] too old to fight) was working steadily, but his presence had long been the sign of a B-picture. This, however, was not an era for A-pictures, because the world was otherwise occupied. Though this movie is only explicitly about the war as a cheap plot device, the war was still important behind the scenes.

I would imagine that most people have their favourite East End Kids pictures, of those who have watched more than one, but there are fewer and fewer people who have watched more than one as time goes by. Yesterday, I was reading someone's ridiculous list of "the 499 Greatest Actors of All Time" (thereby stretching "great" like Silly Putty), and the thing which surprised me most about it was how many of those actors were people even I had to look up--and there were a lot that I had to identify for Graham. I take a certain amount of smug pleasure in the fact that most of my favourite actors are dead, more than a few dead before I was born. At the same time, though, there's something a bit lonely about it. I can't really discuss whether Paul Muni belongs on such a list or not with most people, because most people have no idea who he was. (The original Scarface.) That being said, I must confess you aren't missing much if you've never heard of the East Side Kids.