Ghost Catchers (Universal, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was the third and, for some reason, most obscure of the four films the comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson made for Universal between 1941 and 1945, Ghost Catchers. I’ve been telling the Olsen and Johnson story a lot in these pages lately, but just to recap: they were veterans of vaudeville who had been playing the circuits for years in the 1920’s and 1930’s and had made a few undistinguished movies for Warner Bros. and Republic until 1938. That year they put an expanded version of their vaudeville show on the Broadway stage as a revue called Hellzapoppin’, and it was an enormous hit. Among other things, its success brought Olsen and Johinson a four-film contract with Universal, including a movie of Hellzapoppin’ which simultaneously tried to bring the show more in line with movie conventions and made fun of itself for doing so. Their second Universal film, Crazy House, cast them as comedians unceremoniously ejected from Universal and forced to produce a movie on their own – it’s long been a personal favorite of mine and the presence of Count Basie as the main musical guest star also helps.

Ghost Catchers was their third Universal film, and the one that came closest to having an actual plot: Southern-fried Col. Breckenridge Marshall (Walter Catlett) brings his two daughters, Susannah (Martha O’Driscoll) and her younger sister Melinda (Gloria Jean), to present them in a song recital at Carnegie Hall, with Melinda as singer and Susannah as her accompanist. Only they need a place to stay while preparing for the concert, and Col. Marshall makes a deal for a six-months’ lease on a house that’s the cheapest place of sufficient size they can afford. The real-estate agent gives them veiled warnings that the place is haunted, and when the Marshalls move in the two women are beset by noises of horses, other mysterious sounds and a cut-out in the walls through which two eyes are watching them. After a reel of this, Susannah is sufficiently scared she runs out of the house and goes to the next-door neighbors for help. Unfortunately for her, the next-door neighbors are Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, who are running a nightclub (apparently writers Edmund L. Hartmann – who also produced – Eddie Cline, who also directed, and Milt Gross, whose story “High Spirits” provided the basis for it all, had never heard of zoning laws) and subjecting their customers to a steady round of practical jokes and other sorts of abuse.

Their floor show is a song called “The Customer Is Always Right,” though they clearly don’t believe that because some of the performers carry picket signs through the club with cutting slogans that make clear what they really think of their clientele – things like “No Maximum Charge” and a reference to two better movies playing down the street (presumably Hellzapoppin’ and Crazy House), highlighted by a big banner announcing, “Through These Doors Pass the Most Dissatisfied Customers in the World.” (We get the idea.) Poor Susannah Marshall ends up in a prop electric chair and, when she demands to leave, is ejected through a chute and unceremoniously dumped in the street. Then, of course, Olsen and Johnson have a change of heart and agree to help the Marshalls out with their ghost problem, and from there the film turns into a quite close reworking of the 1941 Abbott and Costello vehicle Hold That Ghost – which in one of the film’s funniest scenes is actually referenced: Olsen and Johnson talk about how unbelievable Hold That Ghost was while their film duplicates one of its most famous gags – a candle moving across a table, apparently by itself – and unseen hands undress Olsen and Johnson and put pajamas on them before they go to bed. (Once again the scene with Olsen and Johnson in bed together “plays” quite differently now than it no doubt did in 1944 – especially since they’re bickering at each other like an old married couple.)

The Marshalls and the stars eventually learn the house’s haunted history – it was built by a Gilded Age big shot who for New Year’s in 1899-1900 threw a lavish party, invited 100 chorus girls from a then-popular show, fell out of a window to his (apparent) death in the middle of the festivities and ever since has haunted the place, doing tap dances and pinching Gloria Jean. Olsen, Johnson, bandleader Clay Edwards (Kirby Grant) and his female singer, Ella Mae Morse (playing herself, though not given all that much to do – just parts in big ensemble numbers with titles like “Quoth the Raven,” whose lyrics are a fractured swing version of Poe’s poem – she had become an overnight star on Freddie Slack’s hit record of “Cow Cow Boogie” and she could legitimately be claimed as the first white rock star, but it would be hard to tell that from this movie), decide that the way to exorcise this ghost would be to restage that 1900 party but do more up-to-date music which will drive the ghost crazy and get him to leave. It works, sort of, but then the Marshalls are kidnapped and sealed in the basement by an unseen person who walls up the entrance with bricks à la Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” (there are quite a few Edgar Allan Poe references in this film even though it’s supposed to be a comedy!) and leaves them there to die until Our Heroes figure it out and notify the police, who break down the walls, rescue the Marshalls and set up a more or less happy ending (though one last unseen hand grabs Chic Johnson as the film fades).

Ghost Catchers is a good-natured film and reasonably entertaining, though I found it the least interesting of Olsen and Johnson’s four Universal films I suspect for some of the same reasons Leonard Maltin, in his book Movie Comedy Teams (from which I first heard of Olsen and Johnson) thinks it’s the best. It’s relatively unencumbered by guest stars – Ella Mae Morse actually has an acting role and shows thespian talent in the scene in which Clay Edwards dumps her for Martha O’Driscoll’s character, saying their ballyhooed romance was only for publicity (which reminded me of how real-life bandleader Harry James was having an affair with his band singer, Helen Forrest, while simultaneously courting Betty Grable, whom he’d met making the film Springtime in the Rockies – James eventually married Grable and Forrest found that out the way the rest of the world did, through the media). Kirby Grant was a real-life singer/bandleader who makes a personable if rather stiff romantic leading man, and the only out-of-nowhere guest the filmmakers trotted in this time was Morton Downey, Sr., a radio crooner from the late 1920’s whose act was pretty moth-eaten by this time. He’s featured on one song, “These Foolish Things” – the 1936 classic by British songwriter Eric Maschwitz (though he signed it “Holt Marvell” because he thought his own Jewish-sounding name would hurt its commercial prospects) – whose all-time greatest versions are the two by Billie Holiday and whose all-time worst version is by Rod Stewart on his ill-advised attempt at a standards album. Downey’s version is closer to Stewart’s than Holiday’s – though I give him points for including the lovely and seldom performed final verse (“The scent of smoldering leaves, the wail of steamers/Two lovers on the street who walk like dreamers”) which I’ve otherwise heard only on Billie Holiday’s incomparable second version from 1952. It’s hard to believe that from Downey’s unassuming loins sprang Morton Downey, Jr., 1980’s Right-wing talk-show host and sort of the beta version of Rush Limbaugh.

Despite the mockery of rival Universal comedians Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost (I’ve previously suggested the reason Olsen and Johnson didn’t become major movie stars is that Abbott and Costello arrived at Universal at almost the same time and made Buck Privates, the highest-grossing film of 1941), the two films are close enough Ghost Catchers almost counts as a remake. The deserted and presumably haunted house is in New York City itself instead of upstate, and the MacGuffin is a case full of alcoholic beverages instead of a cache of gangsters’ money (the cellar includes both wine and distilled spirits; Charles questioned whether the spirits – unlike the wine – could have survived 44 years and still been in drinkable condition), but otherwise the two films track considerably closely even though Ghost Catchers doesn’t include the big final number I was expecting.

In the film the Marshall sisters are able to sell just one ticket to their Carnegie Hall concert – with the result that the hall cancels them and schedules a charity show instead – though the one person who bought a ticket insists on hearing the concert anyway, so Gloria Jean sings her concert to him by phone in a scene that plays quite poignantly today. (Today a concert beiig given by telephone would have a ghastly name like “telerecital” and be ballyhooed as a great new advance in entertainment the way “telemedicine" or “telehealth” – both ghastly words – are being promoted as major new advances in health care.) I was surprised the writers didn’t have either the Marshalls perform at the charity show and become instant stars or Clay Edwards and his band bail them out by agreeing to appear as part of their concert and giving them a sellout audience and us a big final production number. I suspect Universal didn’t have enough confidence in Olsen and Johnson as movie “draws” to spend that kind of money on a big, splashy ending for a 68-minute film – and there seems to have been some major surgery on the movie because imdb.com lists a whole lot of songs Morton Downey allegedly sings in this movie even though the extant print gives him just one!