B Movies

 

Instead of using Reveille With Beverly as a forties B film that locates itself, I should have waited for The Smiling Ghost. Even without the one reference to the draft this is instant 1941, right down to scenes shot in a cutaway car, a character in an iron lung or jokes about tying a bow tie.

The contract lead players, the brassy orchestrations and even the editing, with characteristic soft edge wipes, brand it Warners. Though it’s meant to be a crazy family comedy, it lapses into film noir - the train pulling into the deserted station at night, the door that opens to throw the shadow of a gunman, lightning striking in the fierce rain storm - mixed in with horror movie - opening the mausoleum vault, the family mansion with the secret passage and a distorted face peering from behind the painting. The actual smiling ghost scenes are really quite scary.

The plot (don’t look too closely - this is a studio first half) has Wayne Morris, besieged by creditors but selected from a newspaper advert. his sidekick Willy Best placed over the pay ‘phone. The rich Bentley family require someone on a do-anything basis and he’s chosen, even with feeble jokes about his hair cut. Turns out they’ll pay a thousand dollars to anyone who will announce being engaged to heir Alexis Smith, become ”The Kiss of Death Girl” now that three of her financés have been struck down. Wayne forges ahead. “You’ve heard of her?” “I’ve heard of a thousand dollars.” Sure enough a fiendish monster lurks.

Contract technicians deliver state of the art production values. Director Lewis Seiler was an old hand. He’d done some of the best Tom Mix films. He paces the piece nicely and chooses the angles well. They needed someone not over-endowed with sophistication to take on this one. I cracked the killer’s identity in his first minute.

David Bruce, Brenda Marshall.

The leads are perfect in parts tailored for them, a still robust Wayne Morris “attractive in a kind of boyish way”, spoiled heiress Alexis Smith and intrepid girl reporter Brenda Marshall wearing a massive hair piece. The studio contract talent takes up the slack, the ubiquitous Alan Hale, Lee Patrick, Bogart’s secretary in The Maltese Falcon here glamorised, and David Bruce who was with Marshall in Singapore Woman.

However check the reviews. As with companion pieces like Ben Stoloff's The Hidden Hand or Bill Beaudine's Face of Marble, the one who everyone remembers is black comedian Willy Best, though he’s submerged in the second panel of cast credits. Along with Mantan Moreland and Steppin Fetchit, he does the craven (shot of knees knocking or sprinting away from danger), comic darkie comedy that people like Bill Cosby, Melvin Van Peebles and Spike Lee piled abuse on. The then most prominent black male players in Hollywood delivered variations on this racial stereotype. 

Willy Best

Since the nineteen sixties people have found it appalling. Watching them now it’s possible to see that, despite the dreadful material given them, all these actors would dominate their films. They’d even get laughs. Willy Best (in The Ghost Breakers opposite Bob Hope, who thought his timing was the most polished of anyone he’d worked with) here even makes the one character trait they give him, his support of Morris, register sympathetically.

The Smiling Ghost is a nostalgia piece for a few elderly viewers, a curiosity and a rich hunting ground for thesis writers. I found it a kind of quick revision on all those now forgotten double feature program fillers I once waded through in the hope that they would repay the time.

Then, because it was there, I looked at the 1936 Crime Patrol and it made an instructive comparison with The Smiling Ghost, both program first half movies, one from Warners at full cry and the other from the penny pinching Harry Knight Productions.

Without the standing sets, in-house production departments and contract personnel, director Eugene Cummings (his only credit) has to make do with actual streets and warehouses with a small studio to house his billiards club, doctor surgery and boxers' dressing room decors. Designer Paul Palmentola would live in infamy for his work on the Katzman serials. Here we can see him busting a gut to match the undercranked stock footage stadium wide shots and simulating a Drive-In restaurant with one clip-on tray the waitress collects from the car door. Like a lot of the people trapped on these derisive budgets, he was not without skill. They needed it just to get by.

Leading man is Ray Walker - think a poor man’s Jimmy Dunne, who was a poor man’s Don Ameche. Walker attacks the part with energy and registers sympathetically. He would have a long career subsiding into often un-credited bit parts. Leading lady, one time Zeigfield Girl Geneva Mitchell was presentable and the support cast offered a  surprise with silent comic Snubb Pollard playing his henchman part straight.

Max Wagner with Pollard.

The plot has boxer Walker running foul of small time crime boss Wilbur Mack, by refusing to throw a fight (“All my friends are betting on me”) and being recruited into the police by the prospect of working with an ex champion at their gym. No training montage in this picture, Walker just appears on a neighborhood beat in uniform. (compare the introduction to combat in The Deer Hunter)

Intriguingly the use of anonymous players in unmodified period motor transport in real city fringe settings gives the piece a plausible tackiness and Cummings' straightforward handling manages reasonable pacing. There’s even the odd surprise, as when the store clerk follows the robber into the street and lets off a couple of rounds at him. However Cummings can’t defeat dialogue like “Don’t try to think, fat head! We got to lay low till this blows over.”

Coming at it with minimal expectations, I quite enjoyed this one. Without wanting to over-sell it eighty years after the event, Crime Patrol and the B movie conventions in which it is made, stand up better than a lot of more ambitious work. I can understand why more than a few veteran regular movie-goers prioritised these, recognising them as tailored for their own undemanding tastes.

The You Tube copies on these are OK - and The Hidden Hand is very nice.

Barrie Pattison 2022