'tis the season! Zombies!!!! The Ghost Breakers (1940) and King of the Zombies (1941)

As a kid, I found Bob Hope one of the more annoying adults. His shtick was tiresome, the jokes the very definition of patience-trying, but he had something going for him. Regardless of how little I found to laugh at, he delivered his routine with expert timing, measured beats, and a ridiculous amount of charm for a guy whose propensity for mugging should have been a turn-off. 

But that's just it. It wasn't mugging; he let his audience in on the whole thing. He knew the jokes were lame, but he also knew that it wasn't the jokes that were landing; it was the whole engagement of letting everyone know how the routine was structured, how sub-par the material was, but that the delivery and the relationship with his audience was what made the whole scene work. I found that amazing as a kid; but it also impressed me how many adults really thought those puns and dad jokes (before they were called "dad jokes") were funny. 

Of course, a lot of people of my parents' generation grew up with the tale-end of vaudeville, the rise of the talkies, and the ascendancy of radio shows that promoted a looser approach to comedy. Hope also brought into the works political commentary, much of which would be reactionary and regressive during the Vietnam Era, but which did legitmately work throughout his heyday of the forties and fifties. 

He could have come off smarmy, but as a performer, he oozed everyman charm. You rooted for him because he wasn't particularly handsome, and he was the audience surrogate even during his solo act. Hardly a confrontational comic, he got you on his side by generating empathy for the schmuck on the stage telling mildly jokes with expert timing and set-ups. Hope was a comic structural genius.

Still, he was never the main draw for me on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson or for that matter, even on his variety specials, though he was a spot-on sketch performer. The Hope I grew up with on the tube interested me but I didn't find him particularly funny. Then, one day, my mother suggested I watch Road to Morocco with Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour. Mind. Blown.

Hope was ridiculously funny in this and Crosby and Lamour were revelations of comic timing. The whole ensemble provided some of the wittiest, funniest line readings and performances I'd ever seen in. a way that was far different from the more anarchic stuff I preferred (always, always on Team Marx). I think it was one of the local stations that was running the whole series of "Road" movies and I was sold. I was around twelve or thirteen and fascinated. And amused. 

I also realized that humor doesn't always age well because adults don't always seem to keep up with changes in time. This wasn't a concern for a Groucho or even George Burns, two comic geniuses whose work was steeped far more in observational/situational comedy than the topical/satirical work of Hope. 

Around the same time, I found out that Hope had a career outside the triad with Crosby and Lamour and the first - and best - example was The Ghost Breakers from 1940. I think it might be the first zombie comedy (despite its title, though there is a ghost in there) and it delivers the goods. Hope plays Lawrence L. Lawrence (the middle L is for Lawrence), a radio personality who reports on the hot goss of crime world. It's a weird job, but someone's gotta do it. His motor mouth repartee and asides keep things moving at a fair clip, but again, it's his everyman persona that wins our empathy and sympathy. 

Before we meet Larry, we are introduced to Mary Carter (the radiant Paulette Goddard) who's just inherited the Castillo Maldito on an island off Cuba, as well as the island itself. The solicitor handling the transfer, Mr. Parada (Paul Lukas) attempts to dissuade her from visiting the property, owing on the castle's reputation and general unease surrounding its history. References to its being a particularly nasty place for slaves lend a weight to Parada's words, but Mary is not to be put off. 

Another guy, Hafez (played by Pedro de Cordoba) shows up and offers her fifty thousand dollars for the whole package, but she demurs - especially after receiving a mysterious phone call from a man telling her not to accept Hafez's offer. While all this is going on, Larry has just wrapped his latest broadcast and gets a call from the gangster about whom he reported a human interest story, but who also didn't seem particularly pleased about it. Larry and his man-servant Alex (the great Willie Best) drive to Frenchy's hotel and Alex arms Larry with his .32, just in case.

Coincidentally, Frenchy's hotel is the same as Mary's and even more, they're both on the same floor. In short order, we also meet the fellow who had called Mary coming to meet her to discuss her situation when he's gunned down. At the same time, Larry had pulled his gun out and shoots blindly, thinking he killed the man. 

He finds safe haven in Mary's room and hides when the police begin a room by room search for the shooter. Hiding in Mary's steamer trunk, Larry finds himself shipped off to the port. Alex by this point, has followed his boss and remains in the background while the post-shooting ruckus was kicked up. He accompanies Mary to the port to get Larry out of trunk but, as luck and screenwriters have it, the key is in Mary's other luggage and by the time she gets back, the trunk with Larry is aboard the ship. 

The amount of action that takes place to get to the point where Larry is freed, and also proven innocent (Alex's gun was a .32, the murder weapon was a .38), and the establishment of where everyone stands is executed swiftly and with a deft mix of dialog and action. Suffice it to say, that Larry is protective and fond of Mary, and of course, attracted to her, but the filmmakers wisely don't oversell or promote the romance. It grows organically out of rather fraught circumstances; Mary's never seen a man murdered, and has had a night of men terrorizing her with tales of her inheritance. She has also concluded that the man murdered was likely the fellow coming to meet her.

Also, an attempt was made on her life on board the ship and Mr. Parada shows up, as well. Since his work with her was done, he too is heading back to Havana, his home. Also on board is an acquaintance of Mary's from a swimming event some weeks before. Geoff Montgomery (Richard Carlson) is a handsome, young man who comes to her aid when he sees an unsavory person at Mary's cabin door. He's able to identify the ouanga stabbed into her door as a death symbol. Turns out, he lives in Cuba, as well, and is quite familiar with the native traditions and Vodú. 

Later, as Mary and Larry are catching up, Parada comes along to talk to Larry and we find that he's also told him stories of the local traditions and of zombies. Larry had introduced himself earlier as a "Ghost Breaker", a debunker who investigates supernatural phenomena. In their conversation, Larry tells Parada that he's not a brave man, in fact, he's very nervous and might just shoot a ghost out of fear. "Tell your friends", says Larry. 

In Havana, Mary and Geoff are having dinner as Larry has decided that he and Alex will investigate the castle first, before Mary's arrival the next day. The movie balances genuine suspense and gags perfectly. Hope and Best's chemistry is less the white guy and his boy than two guys who are really stuffing down their terror to get to the bottom of a plot to scare away Mary or worse.

It's at the dock that we meet Virginia Brissac credited as "Mother Zombie" and Noble Johnson as the Zombie. Before I start wrapping up the recap, I want to mention that both Madame Brissac and Mr. Johnson were so much more than what these roles allude to. Both had careers reaching back decades on stage. Brissac was very well-regarded as both a stage and film actress and in later years, played grandmothers, confidants, and moral supports and is likely best known to modern audiences as James Dean's grandmother in Rebel Without a Cause. Her daugher Ardel, wrote the screenplay, by the way, for I Walked with a Zombie (as well as other scripts for Lewton and Tourneur).

Noble Johnson's career was vast, playing character roles and bit parts; but he was also the founder of the first Black-owned production company that produced films that portrayed Black people as full characters and not stereotypes or racist caricatures. He was followed in this venture by others like Oscar Michaux and his company, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company lasted from 1917 to 1922. Both he and Brissac lived well into their nineties.

Back to the movie, Mary is confronted by Ramon Madieros's twin brother (Anthony Quinn) Francisco who forcibly asks who killed his brother and even suspects her. All of this comes to a head in the final act when, after Larry and Alex have done their rummaging around and been attacked by the zombie, for that matter, everyone shows up. Parada is fatally wounded and Madeiros is shot by none other than Geoff who, it turns out, was behind the offer to buy Mary's assets because the property lies on a rich vein of silver. The wrap-up is pretty easy to figure out from here. Well, except for Geoff's fortuitous demise when Alex pushes the wrong button and sets off a trap that kills Geoff.

It's a fleet affair and made Paramount a ton of money at the time. Goddard and Hope had proved themselves a successful and bankable duo earlier in The Cat and the Canary. Of course, Goddard was more the draw here, in some ways, than Hope. Her career reached back to the twenties and she was already a well-established star by the time this film came out. She had been living with Charlie Chaplin (they never married) and starred with him in both Modern Times and The Great Dictator, the latter also released in 1940.

A last note on Willie Best. Hope called him the greatest actor he'd ever worked with and by all accounts, Best was a natural. While he was relegated to (stereo)typecast roles for much of his career, he would occasionally be found in a straight performance. Unfortunately, he was fond of drugs and a bust for heroine effectively ended his film career in the early fifties. After release from prison, Best struggled to find work, but Hal Roach found him and helped him get roles. Sadly, he died of cancer at 48 in 1962. 

The Ghost Breakers proved so successful for Paramount, that Monogram wanted to cash in on their own take of a zombie comedy. Monogram was one of the low buget, Poverty Row studios of the 30s, 40s, and 50s (eventually becoming parent to Allied Artists Pictures and calling it a day in 1979). The end result, King of the Zombies, ain't bad! It's a simpler, dumber, and goofier flick, but it's not without wit and some not half-bad performances. Plus, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for a Dramatic Motion Picture for Edward Key's score.

The gist is that Jim McCarthy, Bill Summers, and Jim's black servant Jeff Jackson crash land on a Caribbean island. Jim, piloting the plane tried to get a response from someone transmitting from the island, though this is disputed by Dr. Sangre, their host who takes them in. There is no electricity on the island. Of course, things are not what they seem.

Dr. Sangre is a foreign agent holding an admiral hostage to extract top secret information out of him (he's resorting to voodoo to do so); Dr. Sangre's wife is in some catatonic state; his niece is scared of her uncle but seems devoted to her aunt, and yes, zombies abound despite Dr. Sangre's protest otherwise. 

Jim, Bill, and Jeff all feel uneasy about the doctor and Jeff feels most uneasy. He's been told to sleep with the servants to show he's not receiving special attention (it's weird, even for the forties; it's obviously a plot device to get Jeff downstairs so we can meet the zombies). Once downstairs, Jeff chats up Samantha, who tells him about the zombies and introduces him to Tahama, who is both the cook of the house and a Voodoo priestess. Jeff is understandably unnerved, voices his concern, disbelieved and sent back downstairs. Rince, repeat until Bill goes down and meets zombies himself (that Dr. Sangre insists don't exist) and Jeff is finally allowed to stay with Jim and Bill.

Late at night, he sees the catatonic Mrs. Sangre enter the room and disappear and this sets in motion other theories about what's going on. The next morning, Jim, Jeff and Bill head out. Jim to examine the plain; Jeff to find the radio transmitter. Jim tells Jeff to retrieve Jim's gun but encounters Dr. Sangre, who hypnotizes Jeff into believing he is both dead and a zombie. Bill is likewise captured and zombiefied, leaving Jim on his own. 

Eventually, Jeff is restored and he and Jim are able to save the Admiral, who's mind is being transferred into Dr. Sangre's niece Barbara's brain to spill the secrets. Sangre himself is backed into a fiery death by Bill and all's well that ends. 

Well. This is no A-list Paramount production, but it's not without its charms. Mantan Moreland proves to be the best thing about the film along with Marguerite Whitten. The two worked together several times and have an easy chemistry. As usual with Moreland, he somehow makes the racist stereotypes that form his character's behavior less offensive. Whitten plays Samantha with a grace and wit rarely given to young black actresses of the day. Whitten was a star of grade A "race movies" of the day and in mainstream films often managed to play subtler characters or tone down the broad strokes that movies of the time often demanded of Black actors. 

Moreland needs no introduction (well, maybe nowadays he does); he honed his skills on stage in theater and vaudeville, toured extensively across the United States and in Europe, all too frequently played the same character of the bug-eyed, easily befuddled/frightened Black manservant or other service roles. However, he was given roles throughout his career where he actually could play a non-comedic role and very solidly. Nevertheless, he faced financial hardship even in the height of his fame in the 1940s and returned to touring after the war. His last featured role was in Spider Baby in 1964 (released in 1968 and one of my personal favorite cult films). 

Moreland suffered a stroke in the early sixties and slowed his output down, though he still continued working on TV and onscreen, often in bit roles or uncredited. What goes unsaid is that after the war, as attitudes to how African Americans were portrayed were changing, Moreland found fewer parts available. He was unfairly typecast and the lack of work led to a lack of income and hence, the touring (with no less than Redd Fox and Nipsey Russell in tow). 

For all that the inherent minimizing of Jeff's status was built into the script, it was heartening not to see that reflected in how the other characters treated him. Jim and Bill weren't merely indulgent; they were just dismissive of his early claims of meeting zombies. This changed after Bill had his run-in with two of them. 

Victor Henry's Dr. Sangre was originally written for Bela Lugosi and when Lugosi wasn't available, Monogram offered the role to Peter Lorre who turned them down. Henry had been a well-respected actor in the silent films but his thick German accent pretty much ended his prospects for leads. That said, he was a worthy character actor and apparently enjoyed the roles he did get.

John Archer who played Bill, had a career that lasted nearly sixty years. He played rough and tumble types, including a strong turn in White Heat. He was another one of those actors whose face you'd recognize but would rarely know the name to go with it. 

The lead, Dick Purcell, was the first person to play Captain America on screen in the Republic serial. It's actually one of Republic's best (which is high praise, by the way), but the series was originally intended to be for a wholly other character. The Capt. America we meet isn't Steve Rogers, doesn't have a shield, and is possessed of a dad bod unlike any other superhero I've seen. Purcell died and untimely death about two months after the serial's release.

Lastly, Madame Sul-Te-Wan, who played Tehama the priestess, was the first African American actor to be signed as a feature player. She had a massive career on stage and on screen became a recognizable, if often uncredited player (she didn't receive her first "named" role until 1937. She was mostly relegated to "native woman", if not "mammy" roles, but was occasionally found in character roles with more nuance. Even here in King of the Zombies, you feel like there's more going on than just another "evil woman" role. She worked with everybody, from Griffith to von Stroheim to Preminger in seemingly everything from Birth of a Nation to the first Tarzan of the Apes to King Kong to Carmen Jones. 

It's funny what sticks with you. I vaguely remember watching King of the Zombies on Jungle Theater on Channel 13 in Houston when I was kid. I remember liking it, but then I also liked Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla which also ran (repeatedly). But what stuck with me had been the sweetness of the relationship between Jeff and Samantha in the film. As a kid, it stuck out because it was a quieter moment in a bunch of busy stuff; as an adult, it's a stunning note of charm in a pretty ridiculous movie.

In any case, the zombies were mostly of the same ilk as those from the beginning (and in The Ghost Breakers, as well, where Noble Johnson's zombie is void of agency) with White Zombie. Now that we've spent some time in the early days of the zombie film, I think it's maybe time for something more current.