by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Lucky Ghost, a 1942 “race” production (meaning a cheapie with an all-Black cast
aimed at Black-only theatres — usually they pretty slavishly copied the genre conventions of white films, though occasionally,
notably the 1947 Transgender comedy Boy! What a Girl, the “race” filmmakers boldly went where writers and
directors aiming at white audiences feared to tread because of the Production
Code) starring the marvelous comedian Mantan Moreland. He’s teamed here with a
taller, lighter-skinned, deeper-voiced straight man named F. E. Miller and
billed as “Miller and Mantan” in what was pretty obviously an attempt to create
a “race” version of Abbott and Costello. Directed by our old hacky friend
William Beaudine (billed as “William X. Crowley” in an apparent attempt to make
him sound Black, much the way pioneering white jazz guitarist Eddie Lang was
billed as “Blind Willie Dunn” on his duet records with genuinely
African-American guitarist Lonnie Johnson) from a script (if you can call it
that) by Lex Neal and Vernon Smith, Lucky Ghost is virtually plotless. It’s just a series of
sequences of Mantan Moreland shooting craps (with pretty obviously loaded dice)
with various unsuspecting victims; it begins with Moreland and Miller (whose
characters are called “Washington” and “Jefferson,” respectively — quite a lot
of Black comedians were given character names of U.S. Presidents as an attempt
at an ironic contrast between the lowly stations their characters occupied and
the lofty ambitions of, presumably, their parents in giving them such
grandiloquent names — I’m still
amazed that the real name of blues legend Howlin’ Wolf was “Chester Alan Arthur
Burnett,” and I can’t fathom what his parents were thinking when they named him
after one of America’s least renowned and distinguished Presidents) doing a
Chaplinesque tramp down a dusty road.
They come across a white convertible
whose owners have sent their chauffeur to buy a 50-gallon drum of gas — they
ran out in the middle of the countryside — and Moreland starts shooting craps
and takes them for everything they’ve got, not only their car but their clothes
as well. Then they come across a so-called “sanitarium and country club”
(really a casino, kept in business by bribes to the cops to leave it alone) run
by Blake (Maceo B. Sheffield, who played the lead in the first “race” musical
Western, Harlem Rides the Range).
The moment Mantan lays eyes on the singer at this establishment (she’s played
by Florence O’Brien, the imdb.com cast list identifies her only as “Hostess,”
and she’s the first woman we’ve seen in the film — 15 minutes into this
hour-long production!) it’s love — or at least lust — at first sight, even
though she’s Blake’s girlfriend and he’s so pathologically jealous he’ll literally throw out any man who cruises her. Florence O’Brien
sings a weird number called “If Anybody Cares” with a nice band (Lorenzo
Flennoy and His Chocolate Drops) that showcases an odd voice that sounds like a
Black singer imitating the white “torch singers” of the 1920’s; it’s not bad,
but her “flutter” vibrato is really overdone and irritating. Then she and
Moreland do a dance number together, and of course that incenses Blake — who
somehow ends up in a craps game with Moreland, who takes him for the entire
casino and treats everyone to all the food and drink they can consume.
Periodically we’ve seen cut-ins to a nearby graveyard in which some of the
permanent residents have come back to life as ghosts and are haunting the
casino (obviously the writers
were thinking of Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost here), and in the end they take the place over
(there’s a nicely chilling shot of a skeleton playing a piano that may have
been inspired by “That Place Down the Road Apiece,” a truly weird record made
by white boogie-woogie pianist Freddie Slack in 1941 in which he ends up in an
old roadhouse and is serenaded by a band of the undead) and magically divest
Moreland of his ill-gotten gains.
Lucky Ghost isn’t much of a movie, and it’s disappointing that
Moreland and Miller don’t get to do one of those bizarre double-talk scenes
we’ve seen Moreland do in other movies (the ones in which he and someone else
are carrying on a conversation and keep interrupting each other because each
knows what the other one is going to say before he says it, so why wait?), but
Moreland is still the only reason to watch this movie. Like Eddie “Rochester”
Anderson, Moreland was able to wiggle around within the racist stereotype of
the stupid Black servant and play streetwise instead of just dumb; indeed in
some ways he’s funnier than Lou Costello, whose whiny reaction when he got
“taken” by Bud Abbott sometimes gets annoying when it’s clearly meant to be
humorous. Some of Moreland’s films are a trial because he wasn’t given good
material; this time around he got some nice lines even without a double-talk
scene, and it’s also nice to see him dance. (He’d previously been in the 1937
film Shall We Dance with Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers: he’s the man in the ship’s engine room who kicks off
the “Slap That Bass” number, and he was a good enough singer and dancer to hold
his own as opening act for Fred Astaire.) Incidentally, imdb.com lists this
film not as Lucky Ghost, but under the reissue title, Lady Luck — which sounds a good deal more ordinary and doesn’t
give you the key clue as to what it’s really about. There’s also an intriguing gag in the film in which Moreland,
unable to write, signs the guest book at the casino with an “X” — which leads
Florence O’Brien and everyone else there to call him “Mr. X.” After Malcolm X
and the Nation of Islam, this gag “plays” quite differently now than it no
doubt did in 1942!
