by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I turned on TCM for the
first time in quite a while (I used to watch this channel religiously until Cox
Cable’s damnable “all-digital” conversion deprived me of the ability to use my
DVD recorder — if I want to time-shift shows for later viewing I’d have to pay
even more money on a cable bill that’s already way too high!) even though the
movies they were showing weren’t very good: they decided to devote the night
before Hallowe’en to a bunch of haunted-house movies featuring the Bowery Boys,
and the one I happened to squeeze into my schedule was Spook Chasers (1957), the 45th and fourth-from-last of the Bowery Boys movies. There were 48 in all, and this does not count the ones they made before 1946 (when they
officially adopted the “Bowery Boys” moniker) as the Dead End Kids, the Little
Tough Guys and the East Side Kids. The whole thing began when Sidney Kingsley’s
play Dead End premiered on Broadway in
1935. The play’s theme was the persistence of crime in the slum neighborhoods
of New York City and how the limited opportunities available for slum kids
turned them into criminals just as their elders had been. According to the
Wikipedia page on Dead End, “The play featured fourteen children who were hired to play various
roles among the cast, including Gabriel Dell as T.B, Huntz Hall as Dippy, Billy
Halop as Tommy, Bobby Jordan as Angel, Bernard Punsly as Milty, with David Gorcey and Leo Gorcey as the
Second Avenue Boys.” Samuel Goldwyn bought the movie rights and hired most of
the kids who’d played in the Broadway production to repeat their roles in the
movie, and after that Warner Bros. hired them for a similarly themed gangster
vehicle for James Cagney called Angels with Dirty Faces. Meanwhile Universal decided to produce their own Dead
End knockoff called Little
Tough Guy, and the kids in that movie combined with some of the original Dead
End kids to start a series
called the “East Side Kids” at Monogram in the early 1940’s.
The East Side Kids
movies were reliable moneymakers for Monogram — though one wonders why;
occasionally there were flashes of genuine wit and humor in them, but mostly
they were pretty dreary and about the only thing you could say in their favor
was that at least the cheap sets that were the only kind Monogram could afford
more accurately reflected New York’s East Side than the elaborate constructions
on which Samuel Goldwyn had filmed Dead End in 1937. In deference to the advancing age of the
actors, Monogram changed the name of the series from “East Side Kids” to
“Bowery Boys” in 1946, and a year later Monogram formed a subsidiary called
“Allied Artists” (obviously an attempt to rip off the name “United Artists,”
though Charles inevitably joked, “As opposed to ‘Axis Artists’”) to attract
more important filmmakers and offer them bigger budgets without putting them
through the disgrace of an association with a strictly “B” outfit like
Monogram. As time passed and most of the major studios closed their “B” units
altogether, the company abandoned the Monogram name and released everything through Allied Artists — including quality films
like Don Siegel’s Riot in Cell Block 11 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers — including the Bowery Boys movies, which had been pretty dubious
propositions even in the early 1940’s and were totally preposterous now that
the “boys” were in their 30’s. Spook Chasers was one of a number of East Side Kids/Bowery Boys
films that attempted to combine comedy and horror, usually set in a supposedly
haunted house out in the country, and this one, directed by Gordon Blair from a
script by Elwood Ullman (Blair I hadn’t heard of before, but Ullman I had; he
was an associate of soundman turned director Edward Bernds, they’d met working
on Three Stooges shorts at Columbia and Ullman followed Bernds as the director
transitioned from lowbrow comedy to lowbrow science fiction), is a pretty close
ripoff of Abbott and Costello’s 1941 film Hold That Ghost.
By 1957 the Bowery Boys were also dealing with
the loss of the services of their lead boy, Leo Gorcey (the one with the most
potential as an actor — he would have been a quite good “James Cagney type” if
the original Cagney hadn’t hung on so long and gobbled up the roles that might
otherwise have gone to his imitators), who had quit the series in 1955
following the death of his father, Bernard Gorcey, who had regularly appeared
in the Bowery Boys’ movies as the proprietor of the candy store where the boys
hung out and from which they got into various scrapes. Oddly, Leo’s brother
David wasn’t as broken-hearted over the death of their dad as Leo was; he stayed in the series and, along with original Dead
End Kid Huntz Hall, was the only actor in all 48 Bowery Boys movies. Spook
Chasers begins in the diner owned
by Mike Clancy (Percy Helton, not exactly one of the great character actors of
all time — if anything, his performance is even more annoyingly immature than
that of the boys!), where the boys are either working or just making trouble,
it’s hard to tell which. Mike tells them to push the customers to buy Irish
stew, and they just end up either driving everyone away or making them settle
just for coffee. Mike ends up on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and his
doctor (who examines him at the diner, no doubt to save Allied Artists née Monogram the cost of another set) prescribes a
long rest at an isolated country home. An unscrupulous real-estate agent, Harry
Shelby (Bill Henry), sees his chance to unload an old, decrepit house called
“Cedar Crest” on Mike and the boys — today a realtor would advertise this as a
“fixer-upper” and make a ton of money — but what Shelby and his
assistant/secretary/girlfriend Dolly Owens (Darlene Fields, the only woman in
the movie except for two girls who turn up at the end, and by far the most
interesting performer and best actor of either gender in it) don’t realize is that the house’s
previous owner, a now-deceased gangster, hid the “take” from a bank robbery
he’d been involved in and which he’d stolen from the other three people
involved in the crime: “Snap” Sizzolo (Peter Mamakos), whose habit of punctuating every line of
dialogue by snapping his fingers at the end of it at least gives him a certain
appeal; and his henchmen.
Once Shelby and Dolly learn this, they converge on
the house to find the money — which Dolly helps locate by vamping the secret
out of “Sach” (Huntz Hall), the lead Bowery Boy since Leo Gorcey’s departure
and always the dumb one of the crew, who by this time had started to look and
act like a young Bert Lahr. They also dress up in singularly unconvincing
“ghost” costumes that look like they decided to wear fright masks over Ku Klux
Klan uniforms in an effort to scare Mike and the Boys out of the house by
making them think it’s haunted, and at least one scene features the
disappearing wall-mounted beds the Marx Brothers had used in The Big Store (not one of their better movies but of course a
whole lot funnier than this one!). Eventually the police, who seem not to have
existed until the end of the movie but we’re told had been following “Snap” and
his gang in hopes they’d lead them to the stolen money, show up just as the
crooks are about to off the Boys, the police arrest them and “Sach” somehow
gets an unearned reputation as a hero. The film’s origins in the 1941 Abbott
and Costello haunted-house film Hold That Ghost are obvious not only in the basic situation (a
gang of crooks tries to scare our comedy heroes out of a supposedly haunted
house in order to find a stash of loot hidden there) but even gags like the one
A&C ran into the ground in their horror-comedies, in which the lead comedian sees something supernatural
(or at least fantastic) happen and calls the others, only the scene has gone
back to normal by the time the people he was calling arrive. Spook Chasers is 62 minutes of totally lame cinema, neither
funny nor scary; one just yields to it and lets it pass over you, like a
disease, and the biggest mystery is why anyone still thought there was a market
for homely guys in their 30’s acting like teenagers being tempted to lives of
crime and getting into situations clearly a lot less funny than their writers
thought they were!
