We Watched The Ghost Breakers


The Ghost Breakers gives us Bob Hope before his screen character was firmly established. Skittishness is not yet outright cowardice. Romantic pursuit has not become undisguised lechery. The vanity and conceit that would define the forties Bob is not yet in place. It’s refreshing, and at the same time, regrettable, to realize that this Bob Hope is but a temporary pleasure, and that he’ll soon be defined by the conventions of high-pressure radio and wartime comedy. He’s much more the leading man here, not the brash go-getter he’d become. The possibility of legitimate romance with Paulette Goddard does not require the suspension of disbelief, as it later would in his screen partnerships with Dorothy Lamour , Madeliene Carroll, and others. Bob actually gets the girl here, and we accept it, not just because he’s the star, and therefore must prevail, but because it’s plausible, and we believe in Bob as a romantic lead. This may have been the last time he pulled that one off, and it’s only one of the reasons that The Ghost Breakers is such a good movie. Notice we don’t refer to it as a "comedy", because it’s actually got a lot more going for it than merely that. To start with, it’s got bigger and better horror elements than any half-dozen by-definition thrillers, with photography, special-effects, and set design putting over the spook stuff with a conviction quite unseen in movies up to that time. Paramount wasn’t Universal. They had the money and didn't mind spending it. The Ghost Breakers would not be confined to the ghetto marketplace of straight horror chillers, and everything about it bespeaks class and high production gloss. In that sense, it’s very much like RKO’s You’ll Find Out of the same year. Thrills plus comedy broadened the market considerably, and both these pictures found a much larger audience than any Universal monster show could hope to draw. The scary stuff in The Ghost Breakers must have really been scary at the time, with only the leavening presence of Bob Hope to relieve the audience. Noble Johnson’s zombie is a frightful thing, and the (real) ghost that appears quite casually during the castle sequence is a beautifully realized, and totally convincing, spectre. The castle itself is a lulu --- huge, spacious, imposing. Everything taking place in there is a joy to watch. The Ghost Breakers is a movie we like to revisit, always good for a fun screening every few years. The DVD looks fine. Certainly this show never looked better. We recommend it highly!


The 1940 pressbook promised it would be "Scarier and Merrier" than the previous year’s The Cat and The Canary. Every tie-in imaginable was put into play. Fashion lay-outs for Paulette Goddard (one of them shown here) were designed with Edith Head’s assist. Bob Hope conducted an ongoing radio bally that reached 61 affiliates on the NBC Red Network. The ad campaign was stellar --- check out the example here.