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Review by E.C.McMullen Jr. |
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SCARED TO DEATH- 1946USA Release: February 1, 1947 Golden Gate Pictures, Screen Guild Productions Rating: N/A |
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Christy Cabanne (1888 - 1950) directed over 145 movies and SCARED TO DEATH was one of them: One of the last ones.
Christy was just a guy, see? Yeah, back in the day when guys and gals would have the same name. You couldn't tell much about a person by their first name.
Charlie/Charly, George, Francis, Kelly, Leslie, Marion, Pat, Taylor, Terry, why with a name like those, it could be any Mug or Skirt, see?
Hell, the star of this movie was named Bela!
Anyway, Christy had his successes, he even directed a frightening movie or two (THE WORLD GONE MAD, ONE FRIGHTENED NIGHT, THE MUMMY'S HAND). Christie was also hot off the successful run of his comedy mystery franchise, the SCATTERGOOD series starring Guy Kibbee (Who? Yeah, I know).
Christie just loved making movies, non-stop was his preferred method, and he would take nearly anybody's money. This despite an era of shitkicker cinema and mob movies, as most directors would have a full Call Sheet of these for their resume, but Christie seemed to prefer comedy whenever he got the chance and Mystery Thrillers more often than not.
With SCARED TO DEATH (Filmed in "Natural Color"), Christie tried to mix all of those things plus Horror.
On the good side, and one of the reasons why bad Horror movies from the 1930s through 1960s are still good, is that the audience is never expected to sit through 30 or more minutes of shit drama before the damn story finally begins.
No, SCARED TO DEATH begins at the City Morgue, the Autopsy Room to be exact, where the Coroner (Stanley Andrews: THE GREEN HORNET [1940]) laments that,
"One hates to perform autopsies on beautiful women."
Give him ugly women any day. He can't wait to hack them up.
TRIVIA Actor Stanley Andrews made 385 movies, yo! Over 25 in 1935 alone and that was a slow year for Stanley. Audiences recognized him but nobody knew his name because he nearly always played uncredited roles. Judging by his prodigious output, Stanley tended to shy away from Horror, Monster movies, and Science Fiction, preferring shitkickers and radio shows. This largely helped him avoid having fans who might recognize him on the street, which apparently suited him just fine. He remains unremembered today. According to actor Nat Pendleton's IMDb page, he's described thusly, "For two decades, this massively-built, dark-haired, good-looking lug played a number of kind-hearted lunkheads, goons, henchmen and Joe Palooka-like buffoons." When you hired Nat, you knew what kind of character you were looking for, and when Nat got the job, this former Pro Wrestler knew what you expected! This was Bela Lugosi's only color movie, shot in the relatively inexpensive Cinecolor. Because it was cheaper than Technicolor (and nowhere near as good) it was used for plenty of Cowboy shoot-em up movies. Because so many of those were made in the 1940s, it became so common that Cinecolor became nearly as cheap as black and white, attracting the so-called "Poverty Row" studios who would use it to attract aging talented actors like Bela Lugosi and George Zucco who were otherwise reluctant to do Poverty Row type pictures. "This will be in color, you say? Well, all right then!" George Zucco was hired for a part written for actor Lionel Atwill, who was unable to do the role as he was dying from lung cancer when production was ready to begin. Both men were 5' 10", and both, because of their red hair in youth, were nicknamed "Pinky". Lung cancer may or may not have killed Lionel, however, as his weakened immune system might have succumbed to pneumonia. In any case, he died in 1946 and Zucco got the role. Zucco most definitely died of pneumonia in 1960. |
Instead of going about his job, the Coroner stands, there, waxing his philosophical over the dead woman.
What is the last thought of people when they die?
The corpse, possibly bored, answers his question with her thoughts and we hear them (just go with it). At this point, she becomes the half-assed, entirely unuseful narrator throughout the whole movie.
Unuseful because there's nothing she tells us that the movie either didn't just show us, or does show us immediately after she tells us. You can also hear the abrupt audio cut into and out of everyone of these as they go back to her laying cold on the autopsy table.
Such a pointless movie is SCARED TO DEATH. It was writer Walter Abbots first movie and it took him five years to sell his next one, which was also his last one. This was at a time when Poverty Row movies would hire nearly anyone off the street to write a script, so you can imagine how awful Walter's had been.
The corpse, in life, was a woman named Laura Va Ee (Molly Lamont) and she wakes up in a doctor's office, screaming as he's about to put a cloth over her face.
Doctor Joseph Van Ee (George Zucco: LONDON BY NIGHT, ARREST BULLDOG DRUMMOND, CHARLIE CHAN IN HONOLULU, THE MAGNIFICENT FRAUD, THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME [1938], THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, THE CAT AND THE CANARY [1939], THE MUMMY'S HAND, DARK STREETS OF CAIRO, THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL, THE MAD MONSTER, DR. RENAULT'S SECRET, THE MUMMY'S TOMB, SHERLOCK HOLMES IN WASHINGTON, DEAD MEN WALK, THE BLACK RAVEN, THE MAD GHOUL, VOODOO MAN, THE MUMMY'S GHOST, RETURN OF THE APE MAN, HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, FOG ISLAND) is her Father-in-law, and he's coldly surprised by her reaction. After all, she came to him for help.
If Dr. Ee's temper is ice cold, Laura's is red hot as she begins accusing the Doc of every criminal thing under the sun.
Sheesh! Why on earth did she go to him to calm her nerves in the first place?
So far they are both unlikable characters, but do both of them have ulterior motives or is one the unwilling victim of the other?
As both are squaring off, Ward Van Ee (Roland Varno: THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE) - husband to one, son of the other, enters the room and tells his wife to stop pestering his father. Laura, now in fifth gear and smiling, happily sneers at Ward, threatening him and insulting him, even hinting that the father and son may be gay for each other. How insouciant!
Laura leaves the office and Dr. Ee's maid, Lilybeth (Gladys Blake: LUCKY DEVILS, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA [1943], BEWTICHED, NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES) enter to do little more than introduce her character, and openly vent her intimidation over Mrs. Van Ee.
"You know how she can get!"
By this point, the movie tilts toward the idea that Laura, the corpse telling us this tale, may have brought her misfortune on herself.
Or did she?
Dr. Ee, his son, and his maid may be the innocent victims of her machinations.
Or ARE they?
As we wait for the lead actor, Lugosi, to make his entrance, we meet Dr. Ee's private policeman, Bill "Bull" Raymond (Nat Pendleton: PHANTOM RAIDERS, THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET). Bull is supposed to be the lunk-head comedy relief but with this script, and try as he might, he just can't cut it. Whenever he shares a scene with the woman he loves, Blake's Lilybeth, he stands in place, practically addressing the audience as he breaks the 4th wall in one of his many soliloquies of stupid flounders to an embarrassing degree, as Gladys Blake was a successful stand-up comic before turning to movies and she could improvise circles around Nat.
Bela Lugosi (DRACULA, WHITE ZOMBIE, THE HUMAN MONSTER, SPOOKS RUN WILD, THE DEVIL BAT, THE CORPSE VANISHES) finally enters the picture, all demands and threats, as Professor Leonide, along with his manservant, Indigo (Angelo Rossito: SEVEN FOOTPRINTS TO SATAN, FREAKS, MR. WONG IN CHINATOWN, SPOOKS RUN WILD, THE CORPSE VANISHES, THE SPIDER WOMAN, DEMENTIA, INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN, TERRIFIED, BRAIN OF BLOOD, DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN, THE DARK, MAD MAX: BEYOND THUNDERDOME, FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM) in tow.
Despite his character's seemingly cruel demeanor, Bela leads every scene he's in with a comforting warm sly grin (Lugosi began his career playing Jesus, after all), to let you know he's in on the joke and won't be the monster he usually played.
Overall, you can see what everybody was going for, trying to achieve, which was laugh a minute comedy, something Cabanne spent decades in successfully honing his craft: Something the cast could deliver. If only the scripted situations and lines were funny. And it all could have been if writer Walter was only up to it, but he wasn't.
The characters are all broad caricatures, emotions all on the surface, and if the canny verbal hijinks of the Marx Brothers or Cantinflas, or the whacky physical humor of the Three Stooges were thrown in for slapstick it might have all worked.
The problem with SCARED TO DEATH is, in every comedic scene the situational humor of the characters fears, wants, and frustrations with each other builds to the laugh out loud catharsis of a physical humor punchline and never delivers. The movie doesn't necessarily need the physical cartoon violence of the Three Stooges, but at least the pratfalls of the Marx Brothers. Yet it almost always ends up with someone merely being ordered to leave the room "Ah, Get outta here, you!"
Whenever Cantinflas was being ordered out of the room it was usually with slaps to his head and kicks to his butt: Or at least chased by a stick swinging la Chota.
This was not Producer William B. David (FLIGHT TO NOWHERE)'s first Mystery Thriller, but it was his first and only Comedy, first and only Horror movie, and the last movie he ever made again.
SCARED TO DEATH is a great concept, poorly executed, and remains Ripe For Remake.
2 Shriek Girls
This review copyright 2025 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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