The Ghost Breakers (1940)

4/14/07

Movie: The Ghost Breakers (1940)
Setting: New York, cruise ship, Cuba; contemporary

Re teaming of Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in vehicle designed to mimic success of the previous years similarly themed The Cast and the Canary. The ridiculous plot involves Lawrence Lawrence (Hope) a New York City radio personality who specializes in underworld gossip, who thinking he killed a man (Anthony Quinn), finds refuge with young Mary Carter (Goddard), who herself has just inherited a supposedly haunted Cuban castle; told you it was ridicules. Hope is accompanied in all this by his valet Alex (Willie Best), who plays the kind of retrograde (and in this case comic) black stereotype that could cost Don Imus his job. Not much to this movie, but its likable, Hope gets to crack a lot of jokes and Goddard gets to look gorgeous. The creepiest thing in the movie are that the corpses of Mary's ancestors are kept in glass coffins on display in a room in the castle, I mean really, your just asking to gross-out your descendants when you make that kind of arrangement for your dead body.