The Ghost and the Guest (PRC, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Hider in My House, Charles and I watched a 1943 movie from PRC via YouTube: The Ghost and the Guest, which by pure coincidence also turned out to be about a person hiding in someone else’s home unbeknownst to its rightful inhabitants. The rightful inhabitants are newlyweds Webster “Webb” Frye (James Dunn, an actor way too old for this sort of role; he’d played Shirley Temple’s dad in Baby, Take a Bow and Bright Eyes and been so convincing a lot of 1930’s moviegoers thought they were father and daughter for real) and Jacqueline “Jackie” DeLong Frye (Florence Rice). No sooner are they married that they get into an argument: Webb wants to take her to California for their honeymoon, but Jackie insists on moving into a deserted farmhouse in upstate New York her parents have bought them as a wedding present. As she sings the praises of farm life and all the animals they will be able to raise, I started thinking, “All right, it’s Green Acres with the genders reversed.” Webb has a Black manservant named Hominy (Sam McDaniel) – actually the indb.com page on this show lists the character as “Harmony Jones” but it sure sounded like the characters say “Hominy” – who’s the Black voice of reason much the way Mantan Moreland was in the contemporaneous Charlie Chan movies at Monogram (and McDaniel got to be in a movie with major stars in 1949, when Warner Bros. cast him in Flamingo Road with Joan Crawford, Zachary Scott, Sydney Greenstreet and David Brian). As usual with these characters, McDaniel gets the best lines in the film even though he’s still playing the shuffling Black stereotype.

The newlywed Fryes show up at the mansion and find they already have a caretaker, Ben Bowron (Robert Dudley), who just retired as the town’s hangman and still boasts about his days in that job, in dialogue as gory as the Production Code would let them make it and not sacrifice the overall comedy. The Fryes take delivery of a crate they think contains some of their belongings, but it’s really supposed to be the earthly remains of Ben’s last hanging victim, Honey Boy Sprague. Only the “corpse” opens the coffin from within and takes up residence in the home, which was formerly Sprague’s until Jackie’s parents bought it from the state and gave it to her and Webb. Though it turns out Sprague is actually dead, another convict, “Killer” Blake (Tony Ward), sneaked into his coffin as a way of breaking out of prison, and his gang members show up and assume family identities – “Little Sister Mabel” (Mabel Todd), “Big Sister Josie” (Renée Carson), plus the more anonymous male henchmen like Harold (Eddie Foster) and Ted (Anthony Caruso). The film was directed by one of the most slovenly directors of all time, William Nigh, and was based on an “original” story by Milt Gross that was turned into a screenplay by Morey Amsterdam. Yes, that Morey Amsterdam, best known today as one of the inhabitants of Alan Brady’s (Carl Reiner) writers’ room on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and inevitably I joked on the basis of this movie that Amsterdam could have said, “I really am a writer! I don’t just play one on TV!” Alas, Nigh shoots most of the second half of the movie in total or near-total darkness that makes it excruciatingly difficult to tell what’s supposed to be going on, and while the film ends pretty much the way you expect it to – the local police pick up the gangsters and the Fryes end up staying together and pretty much resigned to rural life – it was nowhere nearly as entertaining as the much cleverer PRC comedy-mystery from the next year, Shake Hands with Murder, which Charles and I had just watched.