BEFORE: I'm back from my break with the start of this year's Halloween-themed October chain, with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin carrying over from "You're Never Too Young". But I'll get back to Raymond Burr at the end of the month, and Bryan Cranston from "Trumbo" also. But before that, I've got to survive New York Comic-Con (Oct. 5-8), two birthdays and a real vacation, which my wife and I have not taken in about four years. It's bound to be a busy month - which is why I might have started watching these films a few days early, but if so, I'm not telling....
I also sort of set my choices for this October's films in stone a couple of months ago, so that I would know that my chain would get me to the end of the year, and this determined how many films were needed for October, which worked out great. Putting off a dozen or so films until October 2018 gave me enough slots to get to most of the films I wanted to get to, but that coupled with the upcoming vacation means I won't be able to take December off from movies this year. Now, a lot of these films came from TCM's new habit of running horror films in the spring ("March Malice") and I didn't find out until the last minute what films they're running in October, so there's no way for me to work those in now. The die is cast....
THE PLOT: Fleeing a murder charge, a busboy and a nightclub singer wind up on a spooky Caribbean island inherited by an heiress.
AFTER: This one's not any scarier than your average "Scooby-Doo" story, in fact it bears some resemblance to your average "Mystery Machine" mystery - just follow the money, figure out who wants the property in question, that's probably the person who's dressing up like a ghost pirate or whatever.
But this film takes a LONG time to get to the spooky mansion - they don't get there until about 80 minutes in. First they have to set up that Dean's a nightclub singer (isn't he always) and Jerry's character is very clumsy (again, duh...) and also give them a motivation to want to get out of town - here it's the fact that Dean's character has been seen romancing a gangster's girlfriend. He also mistakenly believes that he killed a guy and that the cops are looking for him, and for good measure, he's also falling for a woman who's on her way to Cuba, where she's inherited an island with a haunted castle. Meanwhile, Jerry's character is just along for the ride, he apparently can't get a job without following Dean around, and shouting, "Larry! Hey, LAAA-RRYYY!" every few minutes.
On the way to Cuba, they meet Carmen Miranda on the boat, who just happens to know Jerry's character, Myron, from somewhere. I never really understood her act - why did she wear fruit on her head? Was this some weird trend in the 1950's, to make a hat out of fruit? I just looked it up - apparently there was a trend of trimming hats with fruit, but it was back in 1918, and again in 1941, which is weird because you'd think they would need all the fruit for the war effort, and putting it on hats would be considered wasteful. But it seems that Miranda's act came from her appearance in the 1943 film "The Gang's All Here", which had a musical number choreographed by Busby Berkeley, called "The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat", and I guess she got pigeon-holed after that. This seems a little sad to me, if I imagine that by 1953 she was probably continuing to wear the fruit hats everywhere, for fear that she wouldn't be recognized without one.
When her character briefly disappears in this film (they never really say whether she was kidnapped, or fell off the boat, or just accidentally locked herself in the bathroom or something) then Jerry Lewis is forced to put on her famous fruit headdress and lip-sync to a record of her music, because if she (or apparently, someone acting like her) doesn't perform first, then he and Dean can't do a number after that. The song that he lip-syncs to, "Mamae Eu Quero", is one that I know from one of my favorite cartoons, "Magical Maestro", where this dog uses a magic wand to turn The Great Poochini into various characters (including one that sings like Carmen Miranda, of course...).
Like "You're Never Too Young", this film was sort of a remake of an earlier film, in this case "The Ghost Breakers" from 1940, which could also be seen as a precursor to "Ghostbusters". But our heroes here don't seem very interested in debunking ghosts, in fact they assume that in the mansion they'll probably just see a guy in a fake ghost costume or something, but instead they seem to encounter a genuine spirit, and also a "zombie" of sorts - not like modern zombies, that walk slowly and eat human flesh, though. Back in the 1950's a zombie was just a resurrected guy who had no free will, so that someone could make him do anything, even employ him as cheap labor. I guess that beats being dead somehow? Or is it a trade-off, you get to come back from the dead, but only if you agree to do someone's chores and odd jobs?
Also starring Lizabeth Scott, Carmen Miranda, George Dolenz, Dorothy Malone (last seen in "Artists and Models"), William Ching (last seen in "Pat and Mike"), Paul Marion, Jack Lambert, Tony Barr, Leonard Strong (last seen in "Shane"), Henry Brandon, Frank Fontaine, with cameos from Bing Crosby (last seen in "High Society"), Bob Hope.
RATING: 4 out of 10 steamer trunks
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