The Ghost Breakers

source: The Ghost Breakers

The Ghost Breakers is a sort of sequel to Paramount's 1939 hit "The Cat and the Canary", also starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard. Directed by George Marshall (who would direct the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis 1958 remake, "Scared Stiff", as well) it's adapted by Walter DeLeon from the play "The Ghost Breaker" by Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard. The premise is simple, after mistakenly thinking he has shot a hoodlum type, Larry Lawrence (Hope) flees into another hotel room, that of Mary Carter (Goddard), who is packing for a trip to Cuba. Befriending her, it's not before long that Larry is on his way to Cuba as well, but Mary is under threat from shifty characters and to make matters worse, their destination castle is rumoured to be haunted and tales of zombies seem to carry some weight. Hope and Goddard really do have a rich chemistry here and the results are excellent to say the least. They would work again for a third time a year later in "Nothing But the Truth". But really it's with the writing that most credit is due here. Hope of course was an excellent deliverer of a line, but first you have to have quality lines to work from, and here with DeLeon's screenplay we get some delightful stuff for Hope to work with. From Basil Rathbone to sly political leg pulling, the gags come quick and fast and compliment the visual fun as Hope, Goddard and Willie Best are all aboard the fun creeper express. Charles Lang is on photography duties and captures the eerie atmosphere of the island perfectly, while a nod of approval should go to Edith Head for her costumes. Ultimately it's fun we want and fun we get, with a cowardly hero and a sexy leggy lady as our protagonists, one can only hope that the zombies don't get in the way too much. As either a stand alone movie or as a double bill with "The Cat And The Canary", "The Ghost Breakers" showcases a fine double act from a fine time in cinema history. Enjoy 7.5/10

Brief Hope/Goddard vehicle which takes an hour to get to the haunted house and then is over all too quickly. For all the praise heaped on it here, this is a somewhat entertaining and atmospheric but very routine picture. Fun for the actors in it, some decent special effects and the odd good line but nothing more really to recommend it. Typical of what Paramount was putting out in the early years. All the bigger studios had the better writers under contract and it shows. Worthy of a look but diminishes after more than one viewing.

Ghost Breakers, The (1940) ** (out of 4) Disappointing horror/comedy has Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard traveling to Cuba where they investigate an eerie house, which may or may not be haunted. I was really letdown by this film after hearing so many good things about it over the years. I kept waiting and waiting for something funny to happen but it never did. The opening thirty-minutes are deadly dry and appear to be a set up for the second half of the film but when we get to Cuba nothing happens either. There are a couple laughs aimed at the black servant but other than that I don't recall laughing once. Richard Carlson, Paul Lukas and Anthony Quinn fill out the supporting roles. A few of the jokes were done in later Abbott and Costello films where I felt they worked better.

Bob Hope made some wonderful, fun movies in the '40s, and "The Ghost Breakers" costarring Paulette Goddard, Paul Lukas, Willie Best, and Richard Carlson is a prime example. Anthony Quinn has two small double roles in an early appearance for him. Hope is a radio gossip who talks about the mob and sometimes upsets them; Goddard is a woman who has just inherited a castle in Cuba. The two intersect at a hotel after a shooting which Hope thinks he committed. He ends up in her trunk and therefore, in Cuba with her, along with Lukas, Best, and Carlson, an old friend of Goddard's. The castle is supposedly haunted, and some mighty strange things occur while Hope and Best investigate. This is a great haunted house mystery with Hope letting the zingers fly at a rapid pace. There was something about the younger Hope that is terribly appealing. He brings a boyishness and an energy to these '40s roles that was lost later on. Goddard is beautiful and lively, Lukas excellent as the mysterious Parada. Though there is some political incorrectness, Willie Best and Hope spar as equals. The film keeps a strong atmosphere, with the scenes of thunder and lightning in the beginning especially effective. And that haunted castle - yikes. Call a ghost breaker!

If this isn't a time-capsule I don't know what is. A perfect example of the peurile, unimaginative pap that audiences were standing in line to see seventy years ago. Even that far back they were sequel happy; if a piece of cheese like The Cat And The Canary turned a buck why not remake it with the same two leads (Hope, Goddard)the same colander doubling as a plot and arguably the same set. This time around the film takes it time - something like forty minutes - getting to the 'old, dark, and probably host to a thousand and one horrors, from zombies to stiffs. Along for the ride are Paul Fix, Anthony Quinn, and like that. Pity Gale Sondergaard wasn't available. One or two weak gags and that's about it.

This film & "Cat & the Canary" are easily Bob Hope's finest films! Excellent 'haunted castle' (inherited by Goddard) film. Hope has a LOT of great lines! The blooper is at the beginning of the film; NYC is supposedly COMPLETELY blacked out, due to a thunderstorm. No lites; nothing. BUT.....when "Raspy Kelly" rings Hope's doorbell, it BUZZES! Amazing!

Bob Hope's early movies were rare gems to be watched over and over. Even the Road pictures with Bing are still fun. Too many of today's viewers only remember Bob's turkeys such as "A Global Affair," "I'll Take Sweden," and "Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number." These viewers would be surprised to see a fresh young comic that could quip with the best of them. Another able funny man Willie Best, who never got his due because of the racial stereotyping rampant in Hollywood at the time, makes a better sparring partner for Bob than anyone else including Bing Crosby, although Crosby and Hope were also a winning combination with plenty of chemistry between them. The inspired teaming of Hope and Best reminds one of the later inspired teaming of Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. In "The Ghost Breakers" Bob Hope and Willie Best are together through much of the picture. So each is able to strut his stuff. Many of the asides and lines are as fresh and humorous today as in 1940. For example, Geoff Montgomery (Richard Carlson) tells Larry Lawrence (Bob Hope) that A zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring. Hope replies, "You mean like Democrats." Would many Americans find that amusing today? I think so. As for Best and Hope. Hope tells Best that if he sees two ghosts running down the stairs, "Let the first one by because that one will be me." Best retorts, "If you see another one pass you,let him go because that one will be me." And the fun continues at a scatter gun pace. An added attraction is the wonderful and beautiful Paulette Goddard. She and Hope make a charming couple. Yes, when he was young, Bob was considered a romantic leading man to some extent. Never taking himself too seriously Hope would later use this earlier image as a continual joke. The story based on a Paul Dickey play is also a good one. Goddard inherits a supposedly haunted plantation in Cuba. Bob, who thinks he committed a murder, accidentally ends up aboard ship with her. Are the ghosts real or is someone trying to scare her away from her inheritance? If so, who? Watch and see. Getting there is a lot of fun, combined with thrills and chills aplenty along the way.

This I assert is one of the most-imitated films and the funniest of all time. The producers for once let Bob Hope play a real person; one whose reactions in an extreme situation involving zombies, gangsters, death threats and the need for derring-do made his sensible fears seem believably. In fact, I suggest that the complex plot works quite well. delivering a realistic background to the comedic doings. The great George Marshall did a beautiful job keeping the action going, as he almost always did. Credit for the involving and hilarious story and screenplay are due to Walter DeLeon for the screenplay itself and Paul Dickey and Charles W. Goddard for the play from which it was adapted. The storyline concerns a lovely young woman (Paulette Goddard, the sex-symbol of her era) who inherits a castle on a small island just off Havana, Cuba. Her romantic co-star in the film is Bob Hope as a radio personality, Lawrence Lawrence Lawrence. She is warned off by Senor Perada (Paul Lukas), who tells her everyone who has spent a night in the castle has gone mad. In the meantime, a gangster takes exception to Hope's broadcast and send a man to kill him. Hope believes he has shot the man, really killed by Perada; so he ends up fleeing to Cuba, and helping Goddard. An old acquaintance of hers, played amiably by Richard Carlson, and twin brothers played by a young Anthony Quinn (one of them the murder victim)complicate matters; so do some hard-to-explain zombies, and sinister accomplices of various sizes. Without a scorecard it is difficult to separate the players, but one of the most important is Hope's aide, ably played by master straightman Willie Best without a trace of racial stereotyping; he is loyal, at least as brave as his boss and a great asset to the movie. There is the usual treasure that is causing the villains to scare off the normals; and there is a surprise ending, which I will not divulge. In their parts, Hope is at the top of his considerable powers; Goddard has a merely o.k. voice but has the character strength and charisma necessary to her essentially decorative role as a young woman. Willie Best is outstanding as Hope's sidekick and straight man; Anthony Quinn is promising, young and sullen as twin gangsters; Richard Carlson does a bright job of playing off-type as a duplicitous villain; and Paul Lukas is extremely powerful as Senor Perada, a wonderfully villainous red herring. others in the large and attractive cast include Pedro de Cordoba, Virginia Brissac, Tom Dugan, Lloyd Corrigan, and minor roles by Robert Ryan and Douglass Kennedy. The film's fine cinematography was done by veteran Charles Lang; the music was supplied by Ernest Toch and Victor Young 9uncredited). Art direction by Hans Dreier and Robert Usher was outstanding and atmospheric; Edith Head did the costumes and the interior decorations were the work of A.E. Freudman. The film to my eyes is stylish, consistent and varied; from the sailing into Havan harbor to the sequences in and under the castle to the shipboard and preceding city scenes, everything is beautiful, funny and of a piece. A comedy classic.

If you're only going to watch one Bob Hope movie in your life…it should definitely not be this one. Hope plays Lawrence Lawrence Lawrence, a gangland reporter for the radio. Well, he's actually playing Bob Hope but you know what I mean. After he says the wrong thing on the air, Lawrence is summoned to a possibly fatal encounter at a hotel room but after mistakenly thinking he murdered someone, Lawrence winds up in a trunk on his way to Cuba. The trunk belongs to Mary Carter (Paulette Goddard), who's just inherited a castle on an island off the Cuban coast. Even though people try to buy her off with money and scare her off with ghost stories, Mary is determined to see the castle for herself and Lawrence decides to tag along out of self-deprecating chivalry. They run into the twin brother of the man Lawrence thought he killed, an actual zombie, a ghost and a secret in the castle straight out of an episode of Scooby-Doo. Not one of the good ones, one of the crappy episodes with Scrappy-Doo. There's not much to say about The Ghost Breakers expect that it's a pretty poor effort at telling a story. It's fast moving, but that's because it doesn't want the audience to stop and think about what they're watching. This movie is sort of like an ancient ancestor of the early Jim Carrey movies like Ace Ventura, where the plot is nothing more than an excuse for the star to act funny. For Carrey it's physical comedy, for Hope it's a constant stream of quips. Much of Hope's humor in this film hasn't aged that well, but he was never one to play for the ages. He was only interested in playing for the back row of the theater. Paulette Goddard is okay playing her era's stereotype, the tough broad with the smart mouth who falls into the hero's arms at the end of the picture. There's only one more thing to say about The Ghost Breakers, either for good or ill. If you're going to watch this movie, you'd better be ready to overlook Lawrence's Steppin Fetchit-like butler Alex (Willie Best). It's not a malevolently racist character. It's just the average, everyday kind of bigoted depiction of a black man that was simply part of the cinema of that generation. It is a bit uncomfortable to see a legendary figure like Bob Hope and be so forcibly reminded of the ugliness of the era in which he made most of his legend. Hope was always more of a showman than an actor and there are much better examples of his classic work than The Ghost Breakers. You might want to give one of them a try.