Directed by: Elliott Nugent
Starring: Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard, John Beal, Douglass Montgomery, Gale Sondergaard
From: Paramount
“Don’t big empty houses scare you?
Not me; I used to be in vaudeville.”
A wide variety of films will be watched for my Halloween season list, as has always been the case. One may not even be horror related and instead relates in some way to the holiday. Assuredly this won’t be the only horror-comedy that will be discussed, although truth be told this is more a comedy-mystery that has some horror elements present. After all, the movie is a more comedic take on a play that now is 100 years old & has been made into a motion picture several times, including the lost film The Cat Creeps, from ’30.
A lot happens with this plot: various cousins get together in a decrepit mansion deep in the Louisiana bayou; that house has a Creole lady as a caretaker, who was the lover of the house’s owner-he passed away 10 years ago. The will is read and of course only one person receives the entire fortune. Besides a spooky mansion where Ms. Creole says is “inhabited by spirits” there is gaslighting done to the one lucky heir, secret passageways, a missing necklace, and even an “escaped maniac from an asylum” who of course looks like a mutant. All this in only 74 minutes.
While not as funny as the other Hope movies I’ve checked out, enough laughs were present where I can’t complain. This was mostly light entertainment which never becomes too scary. At least there is some atmosphere w/ the swampy setting, along with the creepy house & dark basements. Instead of closing this out w/ my puzzlement at how there’s a romantic angle here (as all these people are cousins to each other!) I’ll mention that Hope’s character is an actor who does radio plays. Thus, the plots of mystery stories are familiar to him and henceforth, he actually made meta comments about the proceedings and what he expected next. How common that trope was in entertainment over 80 years ago is unknown to me; regardless, that did provide me amusement.
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