‘The Ghost Breakers’ or — Under the Influence of Spirits?
‘The Ghost Breakers’ (1940) gets off to a cracking start: thunder booms and lighting flashes over a New York skyline of towering skyscrapers during a power cut. Paulette Goddard gazes out over the darkened city from her window. There’s talk of murder, a place called Black Island and ghosts. Goddard flings open a window to receive the full force of the elements, turns to her companion (but really she’s talking to us) and declares with a thrill-powered smile “Exciting, isn’t it?!” And it certainly is, especially as the mob is after Bob Hope, too, for spilling their secrets on the radio.
And then a couple of problems appear, the most notable being that the whole Black Island storyline gets almost completely shoved aside and isn’t properly picked-up again until almost the last act. This isn’t an issue as such as what occurs until then is highly entertaining. What is a problem are some highly racist jokes Hope cracks at his black valet, Alex’s (Willie Best), expense that made me relieved I was watching this movie in private. “Uh ho,” I thought to myself, “I hope it doesn’t continue like this.” The good news is that despite the inherently problematic nature of Alex’s role he soon ceases to become the butt of any jokes and actually becomes an active participant in many of the film’s funniest scenes. And Willy Best times his comedy perfectly.
A great example is when Alex has to search the docks for Paulette Goddard’s trunk because Bob Hope is, for convoluted reasons I won’t go into, hiding inside it. What follows is a very funny extended sequence where everyone assumes Alex has the ability to throw his voice to make the luggage talk. It’s fantastic.
There’s another excellent moment when Hope is searching a haunted house when he hears the grandfather clock’s chimes vibrating away thus creating a highly unusual noise. He opens it and it turns out it’s because Alex is hiding inside whilst shivering with fright. It’s a sublime example of humour driven by sound.
Indeed, you can really tell that a lot of the comedy in ‘The Ghost Breakers’ arises out of radio. So many of the gags are powered by fast-talking dialogue, sound effects or images conjured in the mind as much as the eye. This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise as Hope, like many others at the time, was famous in a large part due to his radio work and it’s great to hear that quick pace that audio humour can get away with being utilised here (as some with a background in radio comedy this appealed to me immensely).
Not that the film is a slouch in the visual department. There are a number of nice sight-gags (although the sonic and verbal ones outweigh them) and not only that but director George Marshall frequently has the film looking like a million bucks and littered with dozens of nice little decorative touches.
Yet the biggest surprise was noticing how incredibly influential this movie must’ve been, and on a number of writers for that matter. The most obvious is ‘Ghostbusters’ (1984) with Dan Aykroyd openly admitting the film as a big influence, yet the film also contains plenty of jokes others have lifted wholesale.
For example, there’s a moment when Alex stands up against a wall in fright, the action causing his bowler hat to flip up off his head. Well, Peter Bogdanovich used the exact same gag in ‘Nickelodeon’ (1976), except to much lesser effect.
Although the biggest example concerns the name of Bob Hope’s character which is Lawrence Lawrence Lawrence (apparently his folks had no imagination) because, HANG ON!, that’s the Major Major Major gag from ‘Catch 22’. So THAT’S where Heller got it from!
This was a massive deal for me because the Major Major Major gag is one of my favourite jokes in literature and I would frequently announce Heller a genius for coming up with something so inspired. Now I discover he ripped it off wholesale from this? Now that’s earth-shattering, front page news as far as I’m concerned!
‘The Ghost Breakers’ is great. It’s not quite as narratively consistent as ‘The Cat and the Canary’ (1939) as it zooms about all over the place but when it is funny it is really funny, sometimes VERY funny. But it was the shock of discovering so many jokes I’d mistakenly attributed to other artists, and lauded them for, over the years had come from this that hit me hardest, and chances are these jokes weren’t even that original back in 1940.
Either way, I think it’s just permanently ruined ‘Catch 22’ for me, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay.
