1940’s The Ghost Breakers is one of the most successful comedy-horror movies ever made. Critically and at the box office it did well and it’s still regularly on the all-time-best shortlists when they’re being drawn up.
It’s a haunted house/ghost/zombie movie with some random bad humans in the mix and stars Paulette Goddard as Mary Carter, a woman who as the movie opens is learning that she has inherited the Castle Maldito on Black Island, somewhere off the coast of Cuba. Rejecting offers from various parties keen to take it off her hands, she heads off to take possession of it, becoming entangled en route with Bob Hope’s Larry Lawrence, a radio gossip on the run from a mobster whose henchman Harry thinks he’s killed.
Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis watched this film before sitting down to write Ghostbusters (the closeness of the titles hints in that direction). Both movies operate in similar ways – they take a long time establishing situation and character before introducing the ghouls. So by the time Mary and Larry are in the castle on Black Island, where the ghosts are rising and the zombies walking, we know who Larry and Mary are and have invested in their survival.
The newer and older movie both tell a story that would work well enough without the comedy. In The Ghost Breakers and Ghostbusters, the comedy acts as a commentary on the action and on the horror genre itself, with occasional excursions into the topical (jokes about Basil Rathbone, Cecil B DeMille and one of a political nature, in The Ghost Breakers). But the story stands on its own legs as a horror tale.
Hope is in his element, playing a slightly manned-up version of his usual cowardy custard, but he is moving faster even than his regular whipcrack pace. As a straight man of sorts, there’s Willie Best, as Larry’s black manservant, who rides over the racialised gags with some style and matches Hope man to man on the to and fro. He’s not just very good but Best’s Alex is integral to the plot, rather than just being a sideshow. He’s funnier than Bing Crosby, whose double act with Hope was still in the future at this point.
In costumes designed by Edith Head to make much of Goddard’s jiggly breasts, Goddard bounces along literally and figuratively, while director George Marshall keeps everyone leaning into the wind. Though he’s best known for westerns, and is also celebrated for directing noirs like The Blue Dahlia, Marshall had directed Laurel and Hardy and WC Fields and would go on to direct Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin – he knows how to do comedy.
Behind him a team of skilled craftspeople make it all look good – the grand gothic sets, the fog and the dust, which Charles Lang, one of Paramount’s lighting stylists, illuminates with skill. But then he is often described as one of the greats, and with a CV including Some Like It Hot, The Big Heat, The Magnificent Seven and Charade, it’s hard to argue with that. Ernst Toch’s score, meanwhile, insists that what we’re watching is horror, not comedy, with a drop into the corny and 1930s well-trodden to hint at the film’s true intentions.
The humour is largely not that funny any more, but the quipping style of it still works, and Marshall’s pace and the playing of Hope, Goddard and Best make it very easy to watch. There’s a relaxed, fun tone – think Scooby Doo, with Bob Hope as Shaggy and Willie Best as Scooby, while Paulette Goddard is an amalgam of smart Velma and sexy Daphne.
The Ghost Breakers is a follow-up to The Cat and the Canary, a comedy horror hit from the previous year, which also starred Hope and Goddard, but it was this movie that really seized the cultural imagination, and prompted all the studios to turn out similar movies of their own. They litter the 1940s – Spooks Run Wild, Ghosts on the Loose, Ghost Catchers, Spook Busters, Ghosts in the Castle and so on.
The Ghost Breakers – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
