THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 35

Three Paramount pre-Codes, two John Carradine appearances, two stories involving soul transfers, and one Monogram B-picture. Is this heaven or what?

PICK UP (1933): Mary Richards (not the news producer in Minneapolis with the wacky friends) is let out of prison after serving time for an extortion racket -- which ended in a mark's suicide -- run by her husband John, who has three more years to serve. Having nowhere to go on a rainy evening, Mary ducks into a cab driven by Harry Glynn, who takes pity on her, invites her to move in with him, and gets her a job at the taxi garage as a phone operator. Mary, who hasn't told Harry of her unsavory past, urges him to pursue his dreams to open his own auto repair garage. Over time, they rise the up the social ladder. Just as Mary gets her marriage annulled, John breaks out of prison with the idea of killing Harry, who's fallen in love with a shallow rich divorcee. Mary manages to convince John to hit the road with her in order to save Harry's life. Tell it to the judge!

Pick Up has plenty of pre-code moments, starting with references to "the badger game" (where a woman entices a man to a phony romantic liaison, only to have her husband break it up and force the victim pay hush money). Because Mary is still married, she and Harry shack up for three years; while they're never seen in bed together, you get the idea they're not just roommates. The subplot of the wealthy woman who strings along a "caveman" for her own amusement was typical of the time, as was her horselaugh when the sap proposes marriage. (Pre-codes were often down on rich people, who do stupid things like throw parties where guests dress like children, play on see-saws, and drink out of baby bottles as they do here.) Even the typically sleazy opening theme by the Paramount orchestra promises a good time. 

So why is Pick Up just kind of meh? Other than the slow pace, the fault ultimately lies with George Raft as Harry. An actor's flat, low-key style can often be interesting, drawing you in, making you wonder what makes him tick. All you wonder about Raft is if he would have even gotten a movie contract had he not been best friends with Bugsy Siegel. A pro like cutie-pie Sylvia Sidney, as Mary, leaves him in the dust in every scene they share. In fact, everyone in Pick Up outshines Raft, whose one moment of drama -- hiring a lawyer to defend Mary when she runs off with John -- sounds no more emotional than ordering a new set of tires. Hell of a shiny head of hair, though. (If you're going to watch Pick Up, stick with it 'til the end just for its ludicrous only-in-the-movies courtroom climax.)

BONUS POINTS: An outrageous phallic symbol is provided by close-up of Harry's fuel pump overflowing into Muriel's gas tank. Honest.

SUPERNATURAL (1933): Supernatural's poster promises a great time, and by and large delivers, well, a good one. One doesn't expect a dish like Carole Lombard in a borderline-fantasy/horror movie, where she plays Roma Courtney, who has inherited her late brother's fortune. Desperate to know how he died, Roma falls for the promises of Paul Bavian, a sham psychic who tries to worm  his way into her heart money. His plans are interrupted by Dr. Carl Housan, who has revived the spirit of executed killer Ruth Rogen. Guess whose body she decides to park in? By the end of Supernatural's 65 minutes, Bavian learns the hard way that you don't want to get involved with a woman whose soul has been hijacked by a very unpleasant dead murderer.

Supernatural, a Paramount Picture influenced by Universal's horror shows, is unique by offering two views of the fantasy world. It presents psychics not just as scammers, but criminals -- Bavian kills his landlady when she threatens to spill the beans on his phony baloney. Yet it totally accepts the possibility of the revival of a dead person's soul. (You may recall Man With Two Lives passing off a similar idea as a coma-induced dream.) Perhaps to make sure audiences knew Dr. Housan wasn't a nutty scientist like Dr. Frankenstein, he's played by H.B. Warner, best known for starring in King of Kings six years earlier. How bad could he be if he played Jesus, right? 

Carole Lombard is quite good as the before-and-after Roma Courtney; her style -- even her looks -- change dramatically when becoming possessed by Ruth Rogen.  Roma is such an innocent that you kind of understand why she doesn't see through Alan Dinehart's Paul Bavian -- he has such a kind manner (for a murderer). Pre-cowboy Randolph Scott looks good in a tux, but it's difficult to picture Lombard falling for him. Supernatural is no classic, but it's an interesting change of pace from Paramount's usual sexy comedies and pre-codes. And from what I've read about the guys who ran movie studios then, they all could have used a soul transplant. 

BONUS POINTS: The bizarre, montage-heavy prologue featuring Ruth Rogen testifying in court and newspaper headlines playing up the trial. The rest of the movie doesn't live up to its promise, but it's a nice opening.

THIS DAY AND AGE (1933): So connected is Cecil B. DeMille to Biblical epics that it's a little stunning to stumble across his early pre-Code talkies, especially This Day and Age. A beloved tailor named Herman Farbstein is gunned down by gangster Louis Garrett for not paying up for a protection racket. After Garrett is found not guilty, three high school seniors look for proof of his crime, leading the gangster to murder one of them. Fully expecting that Garrett will once again get off scot-free, a bunch of the victim's friends decide that vigilantism is their only choice. But don't worry -- before they string him up, they'll make sure he gets a fair trial with a jury of every blood-hungry teenage boy in town. Wait, don't they know females are allowed to serve, too?

With a climax almost-embarrassingly influenced by Fritz Lang's M, This Day and Age plays on the crime-weary audience's disgust with pesky things like law, evidence, and guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Perennial heavy Charles Bickford plays Garrett as such an evil guy that you really don't mind seeing him lowered into a huge hole of hungry rats. Don't ask me to recount the name of the high school kids or the actors who play them -- most of them are interchangeable pretty boys who dress more like legal interns than highschoolers. 

There's enough spectacle and violence here to keep modern audiences alternately entertained and shocked. (The murders are particularly brutal, while a teen girl essentially volunteers to be possibly raped by Garrett's bodyguard in order to distract him from his job.) Per usual with DeMille pictures, every dollar of the budget is onscreen, with hundreds of extras, large sets, and handsome cinematography making This Day and Age an unusually impressive-looking Paramount production. 

And don't worry about the girl and the bodyguard. When he learns that she's a virgin, he shakes his head and mutters, "I like my olives green, but I don't pick 'em." See, he's a nice guy after all!

BONUS POINTS: The brief role of the extraordinarily articulate school Vice-Principal is credited to John Peter Richmond, who would soon change his name to John Carradine.

VOODOO MAN (1944): It's an adage first spoken by Aristotle: a movie doesn't
have to be great to be a great movie. Exhibit one: Voodoo Man, wherein two fellows named Nicholas and Toby are kidnapping young women in order for their boss, Dr. Marlowe, to transfer the right soul into the body of his wife who's been dead 20 long years, yet kept in excellent condition somehow or another. Plenty of people would like anybody's soul transferred into their living spouses, but that's another story entirely.

A major studio would have made a B-picture like Voodoo Man an utter bore thanks to writers, directors and actors who were ashamed of the assignment. But the behind-the-scenes folks at Monogram knew exactly how to excite the audience and find the right actors who could sell the product. And in this movie, Bela Lugosi (Marlowe), George Zucco (Nicholas), and John Carradine (Toby) not only sell it, they offer a money-back guarantee if you aren't entertained. 

As usual, Lugosi plays it totally straight, putting memories of his stage days in Hungary out of his head for the sake of the movie. Zucco is hilariously out of place as the owner of a gas station (where the women are kidnapped) who doubles as a boogity-boogity-chanting shaman during the attempted soul transfers. The relatively young (38) whippersnapper Carradine successfully goes to toe with these two legends, channeling Lennie from Of Mice and Men as the IQ-deficient Toby, running around with his arms stiffly at his sides with his mouth agape like the Bryce Canyon. Movie snobs who go gaga for Godard or run tout suite to Truffaut don't know what they're missing by turning up their snooty noses at Voodoo Man. It even features a subplot about a screenwriter named Ralph who's trying to solve the mystery of the disappearing women in order to write a movie about the disappearing women starring Bela Lugosi! That's kind of Fellini, isn't it?

BONUS POINTS: The legendary director William "One Take" Beaudine lives up to his nickname when the gas-ration sticker on a car windshield changes from shot to shot.

                                                          ***************

THE EARLY SHOW, PT. 20

 One A-list feature sneaked into the list this time around, just to remind you I've got a scintilla of good taste. But only a scintilla. 

BEGGARS IN ERMINE (1934): Steel factory owner John "Flint" Dawson is forced out of his job when crippled in an accident arranged by his board of directors rival Jim Marley -- who then runs off with Dawson's wife and baby. Still wealthy, Dawson travels the country organizing disabled beggars into a fraternity with the help of blind peddler named Marchant. Dawson invests 10% of the beggars' earnings while providing food and housing for them in all major cities. He's also been quietly providing for his daughter Joyce, orphaned when her mother died, while still finding time to plan a way to take back his factory from the money/power-hungry Marley. 

I'm not sure what's more fantastical in Beggars in Ermine: the ability to organize the nation's beggars or that a rich businessman would actually do such a thing. It's a credit to the great Lionel Atwill's talent that he's able to make both impossibilities fully believable. And this is an actor better known for roles on the wrong side of morals. Dawson has lunch with his workers, provides them with stock in their company, and is always looking out for their best interests --everything Jim Marley hates. There's a vaguely socialistic bent in Beggars in Ermine which resonates today. Call it paternal capitalism.

This was the first time in over 25 years that I first watched Beggars in Ermine. While it's a pleasure to see it restored from its previous worn-out public domain condition, it didn't hold up quite as well as I'd hoped. The subplot involving Joyce and Marley's son Lee could have been eliminated, thus trimming 10 of its 72 minutes, which would have fully focused on its near-fantasy story.  It would have been nice, too, if Marchant (played by Henry B. Walthall) didn't play the same damn song over and over on his accordion. What I appreciated more this time around, though, was the movie's assumption that audiences in 1934 would be savvy enough to understand its discussions of selling, buying, and shorting stocks, much of which went straight over my head. I wish Dawson were around to organize financial idiots like me.

BONUS POINTS: Only a Poverty Row studio like Monogram could misspell the name of Henry B. Walthall in the credits, despite him being in over 300 movies since 1908. Love his fedora and sunglasses, too.

CITY FOR CONQUEST (1940) Truck driver Danny Kenny turns to boxing to help send his kid brother Eddie to music school. Meanwhile, Danny's lifelong sweetheart (at least he thinks so), dancer Peggy Marsh, goes on tour with the lecherous, underhanded Murry Burns. As Danny and Peggy occasionally reunite, their careers rise and fall. By the end, Danny, losing his eyesight, is now operating a newsstand; Peggy is back to being a hoofer in low-rent vaudeville houses; and Eddie conducts his symphony at Carnegie Hall.

City for Conquest seemed vaguely familiar, as if I'd seen it parodied by Carol Burnett or Mad magazine. And maybe I had. Like the previously discussed Cry of the City, City for Conquest is one of those paint-by-numbers yet emotionally effective dramas that studios turned out with the ease of combing one's hair. A passel or two of familiar Warner Brothers's contract players, starting with James Cagney and Ann Sheridan, further help to make City for Conquest something like the best community theatre group you've ever seen (and I mean that as a tribute to their welcome familiarity, not their talent). Only Frank Craven's unnecessary appearances as a Greek chorus (billed as The Old Timer) slows things down. (His part was cut to almost nothing in City for Conquest's 1948 re-release, but restored decades later, which wasn't necessarily a good idea).

Unexpected actors include 25 year-old Anthony Quinn as the slimy Murry Burns -- his rape of Sheridan is kind of implied without being shown; soon-to-be legendary director Elia Kazan as Cagney's childhood friend-turned-gangster named Googi; and, in his movie debut, Arthur Kennedy as Eddie (he looks like he could be Cagney's brother). Anatole Litvak's masterful direction on what was obviously a big-budget production gives City for Conquest a look as epic as its title. And I dare you not to get choked up at Cagney and Sheridan's climactic reunion. A truly great '40s movie. But watch a waterfront backdrop shake when a car drives by. Great doesn't mean perfect, y'know.

BONUS POINTS: Old Timer Frank Craven was one of the writers of Laurel & Hardy's best feature, Sons of the Desert. 

THE MAD MONSTER (1942): PRC had no shame in ripping off ideas from the major
studios, so it was inevitable they would get around to the werewolf genre. Dr. Lorenzo Cameron -- a scientist of the so-you-think-I'm-mad-do-you? school -- has perfected transferring the blood of a wolf to his half-wit assistant Petro. Good news: Lorenzo intends to give the formula to the military in order to create a monster army to fight the Axis. Bad news: First, he's going to sic Petro on his former university colleagues who got him fired because of stunts like this. Talk about cancelling people!

George Zucco was fast becoming poverty row's go-to actor for nutty characters. And in The Mad Monster, Zucco as Cameron takes it to the next level in a lengthy scene hallucinating a conversation with all his past nemeses. It's rather strange watching what seems to be a "classy" actor happily wallowing in hogwash like this -- I'm certain he broke out in laughter more than once after director Sam Newfield called "Cut!" But as if to make Cameron and Petro even less empathetic to the audience, the first victim is an innocent little girl. That way, we want to see those guys pay for their crimes, because, well, maybe those professors deserved to get clawed to death. 

Glenn Strange's make-up as Petro as the werewolf makes him look more like a hillbilly in need of dental work and a haircut rather than a monster. To further save time and thought, The Mad Monster's writers trot out the old saws of the scientist's beautiful daughter dating a reporter (the inexplicably top billed Johnny Downs) who solves the crime; a thunderstorm in the final reel; and Cameon and Petro dying in a house fire -- before the military gets the chance to turn their troops into werewolves. Next time, maybe.

BONUS POINTS: Glenn Strange's unintentionally(?) hilarious performance of  Petro (before his werewolf transformation) is a carbon copy of Lon Chaney, Jr. in Of Mice and Men. I told you PRC only ripped off from the best. 

LIGHTHOUSE (1947): After discovering her low-rent boyfriend Sam is a two-timer, the spiteful
Connie marries his much older boss, lighthouse keeper Hank. While Sam is quite aware of Connie's -- ahem -- past, Hank remains blissfully unaware until her drunk friend JoJo spills the beans. Soon after, Hank is nearly killed in a mysterious fall into the ocean. While hospitalized, Connie grows to love him, while losing all affection for Sam. But a nosy insurance investigator gets Hank to thinking that his near-fatal slip into the sea might not have been an accident after all, setting up a three-way showdown. 

One of PRC's last releases, Lighthouse bears a strong resemblance to the superior The Voice of the Whistler from two years earlier. It starts out well enough, with PRC's signature low-budget atmosphere, squalid settings (a waterfront dive, the dump shared by Connie and JoJo, a lighthouse well-lived in by two guys), and starring a solid B-movie triumvirate. John Litel (Two-Dollar Bettor) plays Hank as a nice but clueless sap -- how does a guy this blind to reality run a lighthouse? As Sam, Don Castle (Roses are Red) continues his strange career as a Clark Gable-lookalike who sounds like one of the Bowery Boys, while June Lang (Connie) is simply a woman lacking the sense God gave geese. They look like the kind of unfortunates who'd get caught up in a sleazy phare-a-trois (look it up).  

In a way, the best actors are the two who don't initially seem important, but who set in motion Hank's growing mistrust of his bride. Marion Martin's JoJo continues PRC's solemn tradition of extraordinarily blowsy, big-mouth women with hair peroxided to an inch of its life. Charles Wagenheim (there's a B-movie actor's name!) is Quimby, the suspicious insurance investigator who warns Hank that Connie is an untrustworthy slut (in so many words). Lighthouse is actually pretty good until falling apart in its final moments with a happy ending rather than a depressing climax featuring at least one murder and the survivor(s) wishing they never met each other. Doesn't that sound like a better movie?

BONUS POINTS: You'll never forget the incessant flute-heavy eight-note leitmotif, whether you want to or not.

                                                             ******************

THE EARLY SHOW. PT. 19

 No major studios here. Just the almost-finest that Tiffany-Stahl, Reliable Pictures, PRC, and Screen Guild Productions have to offer. 

THE LOST ZEPPELIN (1929):  Commander Donald Hall is leading an exploration to the South Pole when his Navy airship is caught in a storm and crashes without any means of communication with the outside world. One by one the crew dies until the only survivors are Hall and his second-in-command Tom Armstrong. Just as it looks like the two are becoming human Klondike Bars, a rescue plane lands... with room for only one of them. Oh, I forgot to mention: Commander Hall caught his wife in a clinch with Armstrong the night before the expedition started! Who's going back to the little lady now?

If newspaper ads of the time are to be believed, The Lost Zeppelin broke box office records (at one theater, anyway), likely more for the spectacle in the sky than the melodrama on land. The zeppelin-related special effects are what you'd expect from almost a century ago -- primitive by 21st-century eyes, yet charming in their own 1929 way. It's only when the action moves to the South Pole that the movie resembles a George Melies short from a decade earlier, with slide whistles standing in for the sound of wind. Another problem with studios like Tiffany-Stahl is the occasional dubbed dialogue that neither matches the actors' lips nor sounds like it's coming from the set. Despite those faults, The Lost Zeppelin could be mistaken for an early, not-bad RKO production.

While the performances of Conway Tearle and Virginia Valli (as Commander Hall and his wife Miriam) often feel like the already-vanishing silent days, Ricardo Cortez (Tom Armstrong) paves the way for a more naturalistic style of acting that sound required. He's no Brando but is still one of those actors whose movies I catch when they turn up. Outside of the zeppelin itself, he's the one thing worth watching here. If you're a Ricardo Cortez fan like me, I mean. Otherwise, you probably won't particularly enjoy anything about it. 

BONUS POINTS: Just to make sure audiences at the time got an extra thrill from sound, a lengthy montage of international newspaper headlines is spoken in about a dozen different languages, from French to Hebrew -- the latter always good for a laugh back in the day.

STEP ON IT (1936): Former motorcycle cop Larry Evans takes a job with Frank Banning to find out who's been hijacking the Banning Fuel trucks. 

There's no reason to delve further into Step On It's logline any more than there is to the Fast and Furious movies. All you have to do is look at the tagline on the three-sheet to the right to find out who was responsible for lines at the box office. The now-forgotten Richard Talmadge was a stuntman in several silent movies before becoming a B-movie action star in his own right. Talmadge isn't much to look at, and his voice would never have gotten him into A-pictures. And, oddly, the guy can't even throw a punch convincingly, his arms swinging back and forth like a rag doll; when he's not punching with the side of his fist, he's hitting people's backs rather than faces. 

But when Talmadge is required to jump from a car onto a driverless runaway fuel truck, hoist himself upside down onto the roof of a house, fly over the handlebars of his motorcycle when he crashes into a fence, or jump down an entire flight of stairs onto the bad guys, you can definitely imagine the excitement 1930s audiences felt. For once, you see an actor face-on when he risks his life, rather than the back of a stuntman's head. Take that, Vin Diesel! Fast forward through Step on It to see some genuinely impressive stunts that hold up today, even if the movie itself doesn't.

BONUS POINTS: Talmadge was 44 years old in Step on It, which to me seems kind of old for a guy doing these impressive stunts.  (Yeah, I know Tom Cruise is 60, but I'd like to see him fly down a flight of stairs.)

THE BLACK RAVEN (1943): It's a dark and stormy night at the Black Raven Inn. Over the 
course of an hour, its proprietor Amos Bradford will play host to his former criminal sidekick Whitey Cole; gangster Mike Bardoni; eloping couple Allen Bentley and Lee Winfield; Lee's father, powerbroker Tim Winfield (who wants to prevent her marriage); mousy bank teller/embezzler Horace Witherby; and the shoot-first-don't-ask-questions-later Sheriff with no name. When the storm ends, four people will be dead, including Winfield. Did Allen murder him in order to marry Winfield's daughter? Was it Withersby, because Winfield took the embezzled money? Or was it Bardoni, who wants the now-missing dough? Whoever it was, the survivors will probably book an Airbnb next time. 

You can usually count on a PRC movie to resemble a B-movie Hall of Fame, and The Black Raven is no different. George Zucco! Glenn Strange! Byron Foulger! Noel Madison! Charles Middleton! I. Stanford Jolley! Robert Middlemass! For the cast's lone femme, the oft-uncredited Wanda McKay, the Black Raven Inn must have been her own Grand Hotel. I would have been happy just to spend lunch hour with them at the PRC commissary. No doubt Zucco had a good time ribbing his co-stars that he was the only one who didn't have to get soaked under the rain and wind machines. 

The introduction of Method acting was all well and good, but something was lost: the sheer delight of getting what you were expecting when slapping down your quarter at the box office. Zucco & company didn't know from sense memory, unless they were remembering how they played their last 50 roles. No one, save Lionel Atwill, could deliver a line like, "He's suffering from rabid delusions aggravated by a moronic mentality" like Zucco and make it sound classy. When Byron Foulger -- the actor who looks like his name -- explains his embezzlement by whimpering that he was tired of riding to work in subways that smelled like "sweat and garlic", you believe he's a little guy with too-big dreams. Are movies these days better today than The Black Raven? OK, sure, fine, whatever you say. But they aren't better. 

BONUS POINTS: In a reminder that there was more to life in 1943 than double features, a message at the end of the credits calls on "30,000,000 Moviegoers" to purchase war bonds at the theater. Remember when Americans pulled together for a good cause? Me neither.

THE CASE OF THE BABYSITTER (1947): If there's such a thing as a C-picture, this is it.  Private eye Russ Ashton sends his idiot sidekick Howard "Harvard" Quinlan to keep an eye on the valuables -- and the baby -- of a visiting Duke and Duchess while they're out to dinner. The "royal" pair are actually a couple of jewel thieves named Phil and Mamie who are in possession of a stolen diamond very much wanted by another criminal gang. A couple of knockout drops later, the diamond is stolen yet again -- or so people think -- leading to Russ, his girlfriend Susie, and Harvard to try to figure out why this script was even written.

The only reason I bothered watching The Case of the Babysitter is because it's the sequel to a movie discussed a while back, The Hat Box Mystery (did producers think these titles would bring in audiences?) and felt compelled to complete the Russ Ashton trilogy duology. Tom Neal, Allen Jenkins, Pamela Blake, and Virginia Sale (as Harvard's hash-slinging girlfriend Veronica) repeat their roles from Hat Box; all are as IQ-deficient as ever. Ashton still appears to be the worst gumshoe in town; neither Harvard nor Susie make any attempt to hide their contempt for him, even as they, too, are equally incompetent. 

Movies like The Case of the Babysitter never played the first-run theaters; I'm not even sure they hit the second-runs, either. Like The Hat Box Mystery, this seems to have been made for the bottom of a triple-bill for the more undemanding winos looking for a place to nap before getting thrown out to the street. Ace character actor Allen Jenkins was probably happy to collect a paycheck for dreck like this, secure that there would be quality work from time to time to balance things out. But the ill-fated Tom Neal must have known it would never get any better than starring in a movie that no person in their right mind would sit through without one or two better ones at the top of the bill. Which explains all you need to know about me. (Further proof: I paid 15 bucks for an original Babysitter one-sheet!)

BONUS POINTS: At 39 minutes, The Case of the Babysitter is 180 seconds shorter than The Hat Box Mystery. If only it seemed like it.

                                                      ****************

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "SCARED TO DEATH" (1947)

My first viewing of Scared to Death circa 1987 proved to be a three-evening ordeal, having fallen asleep roughly every 20 minutes of its 67-minute running time. It might as well have been called Bored to Death.

Recently I gave it another shot. And again, I kept getting the 20-minute itch. The first time, I got up to slice a grapefruit. Twenty minutes later, I prepared a salad. So I suppose the second time 'round was something of a success in that I stayed awake and ate healthy foods.

Scared to Death has a certain cachet among Bela Lugosi aficionados, being his only lead role in a color production. Hardcore fans hold it in high regard for its allegedly surreal atmosphere --  surreal apparently meaning "sounds like they're making it up as go along." (Best line in the movie: the coroner looks at the corpse on the gurney and asks, "Is this the body?" Please let this not be the guy who has to cut me open.)

Molly Lamont's most realistic
moment in the movie.

It certainly has a strange framing device, being narrated by the corpse of a woman named Laura Van Ee. (The writers were probably weren't paid enough to come up with a longer surname.) We see in flashbacks that Laura was unhappily married to Roland Van Ee, with whom they share a house along with his father Dr. Joseph Van Ee, their maid Lilybeth and their dumb-as-a-sack-of-pliers security guard Bill Raymond.  

Laura believes Roland and Joseph are trying to drive her crazy, while Lilybeth spends most of her waking hours fending off Bill's amorous advances. It never occurs to anybody that they could leave at any time; instead, they all stick around to drive each other crazy. Psychiatrists have a word for this: Family.

"Hands up! Or the little guy bites you on the
ankle!"

Soon this happy home has a couple of visitors, Prof. Leonide and his dwarf sidekick Indigo. Leonide used to be patient there when the house was a mental hospital run by Dr. Van Ee, who is also his cousin. (Remember what I said about "family"?) About five minutes after their arrival, strange things start happening. A green mask appears in the windows. A decapitated head arrives in the mail for Laura. (FedEx doesn't accept body parts.) Someone knocks out Dr. Van Ee in the middle of a phone call to the police. And no one, least of all the private dick, considers even questioning Leonide and the dwarf. (Suggestion to all aspiring musicians: Leonide & The Dwarf would make a great name for a band.)

"Hey, lady, mind if I insult you, too?"

As if there weren't enough people in this madhouse, cynical reporter Terry Lee and his fiance Jane Cornell drop by to check things out. That's the way things are in this town: call a cop, you get a reporter and his girlfriend instead. The next 20 minutes are taken up by Terry insulting his fiance and the security guard. (One of the great losses in movies is the concept of low-wattage women who put up with their emotionally abusive boyfriends.) 

For no other reason that the running time is approaching its end, Laura is hypnotized by a voice from God knows where. During her trance, we learn that a few years earlier Laura sold out her husband Rene to the Nazis when they were living in Paris. Rene, thought to have been executed, has instead returned to successfully (drum-roll, please) scare her to death. That he does it while disguised a woman is scary in itself.

Let me know if this prop ever comes up
at auction.

As you've probably gathered, if you're looking for any kind of sense in Scared to Death, you're watching the wrong movie. Laura claims to be held captive by Roland and Joseph yet refuses to consider a divorce. Terry is engaged to Jane even while openly contemptuous of her. Indigo is deaf yet is briefly seen "overhearing" a conversation. Laura's from-beyond narration "remembers" incidents that didn't happen to her. That narration device is so abrupt and arbitrary -- we return to her corpse several times while the same spooky "Ooh-OOH-ooh" accompanies her voice -- that it seems less an artistic choice and more of a way to cover for scenes that were lost in the editing room. 

 

I defy anyone to come up with a plausible
explanation of what's going on here.

Then there's the look of the movie. The sets (both of them) are like something out of a dream. Not that this was necessarily a deliberate choice on the part of the art director. No, it's the movie having been shot in glorious Cinecolor (Cinecolor being to Technicolor what Blue Bonnet Margarine is to French farmhouse butter). The not-quite true to life flesh tones make the cast look like a Madame Tussaud's exhibit come to life, while the mysterious floating green mask looks blue. Blue and brown, in fact, are Scared to Death's primary color scheme. I'm sure one of the Cahiers du Cinema snobs could read something into that, but don't believe him. Anything that interesting in Scared to Death is strictly accidental. 

Had Hal Roach decided to branch out into genres other than comedy, Scared to Death would have been one of his dandy 45-minute Streamliners. Instead, its running time is padded out to over an hour by dreadful comic relief in the form of Nat Pendleton as the detective, who gets more screentime than the nominal leads Bela Lugosi (as Leonide) and George Zucco (as Dr. Joseph Van Ee).

Usually a welcome presence in B-movies, Pendleton here is merely aggravating, whether making a play for Lilybeth or trying to figure out basic grammar. That his character is an ex-cop trying to work his way back into his old job in the homicide division is a prospect more frightening than anything else in the movie.

"You can trust me. I enunciate clearly."

Not that Scared to Death is a total washout. Bela Lugosi and George Zucco are both in their usual fine form. Zucco in particular appears to be taking these shenanigans quite seriously; you have to wonder if a better-than-average actor like him got stuck mainly in B-movies for most of his career simply because he enjoyed them. He's the cinematic brother of Lionel Atwill -- suave, well-spoken, adept at playing heroes or villains, seemingly sophisticated yet appearing mainly in films where a strong breeze could bring down the set.

Lugosi waits until she's knocked out
before putting up his dukes.

And speaking of actors stuck in B's, there's Bela. For reasons unexplained, Lugosi is dressed like a Southern Colonel in mourning. Maybe it's what all the Hungarian professors in 1947 were wearing. As his fans can expect, Lugosi brings usual panache to the silly proceedings. You can't help appreciate that no matter how substandard the script he was given, Bela always played it like it was a collaboration of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov. People make fun of him -- I've been known to do it, alas -- but the guy was a pro, giving 100% when lesser actors would have just walked through it and cashed their check.

 

Do you know how difficult it is to light
a scene like this?

It must be noted that Lugosi and Angelo Rossitto (as Indigo) -- 6'1" and 2'11" respectively -- definitely make a striking pair. Rossitto's character really has nothing to do other than scurry around, kick people in the shins and hide behind furniture. He's there just because he's a dwarf, looking a good 12 inches shorter than his actual height. Aside from Indigo, Rossitto's other credited roles include Dwarf in Pool Hall, Mute Dwarf, Dwarf Devil and, in a welcome change, Impaled Pygmy.  And talk about an interesting career -- Rossitto's the only actor to have appeared in Freaks and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Respect must be paid.

No doubt, there is much in Scared to Death that is slightly off, occasionally in a good way. Nineteen forty-seven being an uneventful year for the horror genre, between the Frankenstein/Dracula/ Wolfman era and the radioactive insects of the 1950s, perhaps its creators were trying to go down a slightly different path. The genuinely startling appearance of the head in a package certainly provides a hint of what was to come in later years. Yet the very presence of Bela Lugosi and George Zucco provides an anchor to a time that had already vanished. Scared to Death might be considered both a curtain call of one genre and a peek into the future of "shock" movies like Psycho and its brethren. If only it didn't drive me out of my chair or consciousness every 20 minutes.

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