Paulette Goddard

The Cat and the Canary

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Joyce in bed with a disembodied hand making for her throat

Is there anything as unfashionable right now as a Bob Hope movie? The Cat and the Canary is as good a place to start as any if you want to start understanding the huge appeal Hope once had. Bear in mind that this movie was made in 1939, before he teamed up with Bing Crosby in the Road movies, which propelled the familiar Hope character – quipping and cowardly – to even greater heights. It’s a remake of a 1927 silent movie of the same name by Paul Leni, one of the great directors, largely forgotten these days because he died young, aged 44, a year after he arrived in Hollywood just as … Read more

The Ghost Breakers

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Publicity still of Paulette Goddard and Bob Hope with a knife in the wall to one side

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 … Read more