by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other short we watched
was Ghost Buster — that’s right, singular
and spelled as two words — from RKO in 1952, a two-reel short (though we were
watching it on a Sinister Cinema DVD that packaged it to look like a feature
and filled out the disc with something called Killer With Wings that turned out to be our old friend, the 1946 PRC
horror “B” The Flying Serpent) starring a beanpole-like guy named Gil Lamb as Slim Patterson, a
window-washer at the Daily Record newspaper who’s about to fall to his death several stories below when
he’s rescued by the city editor’s secretary, Betty Ames (Carol Hughes). The
typically irascible city editor, J. R. Lynch (Donald MacBride, the hotel
manager from hell in the Marx Brothers’ Room Service), assigns his top reporter, Chuck Dixon (Jim
Hayward), to get the story of the mysterious disappearance of the nephew of
Bigelow (George Wallace — not, of course, the same one!), and Chick determines
to get the story himself and prove that he’s worthy of being hired as a
reporter. When he arrives at the Bigelow manse an officious servant tells him that Bigelow is not
seeing any reporters, especially not one from the Record, and just then Mrs. Nolan (Barbara Pepper, considerably older and, shall
we say, heftier than she was in her days
as the vamp in King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread 18 years earlier), Bigelow’s nurse, walks out on
the job, declaring the house is haunted and she’s not going to work there a
minute longer. (The house really is haunted, not by ghosts but by memories of a far greater film: once
again, RKO recycled the big Victorian-style interior sets from Orson Welles’ The
Magnificent Ambersons.)
Once Slim realizes that
Bigelow’s nurse is leaving and that’s an obvious opening to the home, he leaves
and reappears in drag as “Aggie Patterson” and takes the job as Bigelow’s
replacement caregiver. A few scary/comic things happen in the middle of the
night — notably one in which a painting on Bigelow’s bedroom wall hinges and
reveals a hole in the wall through which a masked figure spies on the sleeping
Bigelow and wields a knife on him — and writers Hal Yates (who also directed)
and Elwood Ullman pull the Abbott and Costello gag of having Bigelow see the
hand with a knife in it about to throw the knife at him, while Aggie/Slim turns
around and sees a perfectly normal scene instead. Eventually, and
unsurprisingly, the “haunted” house turns out to be a gimmick by the “missing”
nephew, who hid out inside the house’s secret hallways (old houses in movies always have secret hallways!) and plotted to scare his
uncle to death to inherit the fortune before uncle got around to changing his
will and disinheriting him, and in case the gimmick of frightening him to death
didn’t work (which he thought it would because uncle had just had a heart attack) dispatching him more quickly
with the knife from hell. It’s not much of a story, but then the plot of a
two-reeler was never the point (Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon and Lloyd moved from
two-reelers to features in the silent era, and Laurel and Hardy ditto in the
1930’s, because they wanted to tell more sophisticated stories and tap deeper
emotions than were possible in the 20-minute running time of a two-reeler — and, of course, because there was more money in features!)
and though none of the people in this film are movie comedians whose names have
come down through the ages, they’re all personable and funny, even though the
main point of interest in Ghost Buster is the comparison with a much more recent film with an almost identical
title!
