Director: George Marshall
Bob Hope and Lucille Ball teamed for the second time in this loose adaptation of the Leo McCarey classic Ruggles of Red Gap, with Hope attempting to fill the sizable shoes of Charles Laughton. That Hope is so unconvincing as an English butler is wrought into the script—he’s a lousy American actor who only barely passes as one! Director George Marshall had worked with Hope on one of his most successful pictures in The Ghost Breakers, but here the storytelling is shallow and inept. If it hits the notes of a traditional romantic comedy involving a confused identity, Marshall’s flat direction and the rushed script gives the film no sense of an emotional trajectory, much less a suspense in the growing infatuation between the unlikely couple. No one involved seems inspired to use the drawing room comedy as the canvas for a Hope genre subversion, and the western elements that become introduced late in the picture are tangential at best. While viewers going into a Hope picture are not necessarily expecting emotional resonance, one would have liked to see this re-imagining carry over a fraction of the sensitivity of its predecessor, which is among the most heartfelt dramas of the 1930s.
Director: George Marshall
The horror comedy genre tends to emphasize the latter so thoroughly that the scares are all but forgotten. While Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein had the right idea in having the cast of horror icons play it straight, it was never effectively chilling–each scare is the set up for a joke where the punchline involves Costello witnessing something terrifying that Abbott inevitably won’t believe. The Ghost Breakers, on the other hand, effectively treads the line between genres. Bob Hope’s wisecracks are relatively understated (his star persona had not yet been established by the point) and director George Marshall is just as invested in creating the eery atmosphere of the voodoo swamp and the haunted castle as he is in the physical gags (mostly involving the talented Willie Best). Things start slowly, but the major set piece of the castle and the things that lurk within is hugely satisfying–the set is menacing in scale and atmosphere, Hope and co-star Paulette Goddard react terrifically to the scares, and Noble Johnson as the zombie is truly frightening.
Director: George Marshall
In the opening scenes of Destry Rides Again, director George Marshall builds his vision of the old west economically and with great style. The saloon in which much of the film will take place in is seen from overhead. A chaotic crowd assembles around and within it – guns fire in the air, men brawl, a drunken man rides his horse about. Images familiar of the genre. Then, Marshall slowly pans away from the crowd to the upper floor of the building, which is dark and its windows closed. A cut to the interior: a poker game. The men around the table, Marshall makes clear, are those who run the town, and as Brian Donlevy’s Kent, the saloon owner, cheats a patron out of his ranch with the help of his cunning lover, Frenchy, played by Marlene Dietrich, their methods of exploitation are revealed. The power dynamic is further visualized in the next scene as a man walks overhead in the rafters and looks down at the drunken, boisterous party below – an image suggesting a puppet master, or even a dictator. All of this sets the floor for the entrance of James Stewarts’ Thomas Destry, the new, pacifistic sheriff in town, who refuses to humor the patterns of the old west and instead seeks to maintain justice through more honorable means. It is clear by the end, however, that the evils of the town cannot be fought with threats and moral reasoning, and so Destry finally must resort to violence in order to salvage the community. A fitting turn of events as, in the real world, a war loomed near. Though the picture exercises little more than the most basic conventions of the genre, it is exceedingly well-crafted and thoughtful – if not necessarily Ford, it’s only a step or two below.
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