I don’t like your performance, my dear. Homer, get Chewbacca to replace her, I’ve heard he’s tired of being stereotyped.
It’s pouring rain, the road is a mudpit, the car dates from the ’30s – the 1930s, not the 2030s – and the catty couple in the backseat, a Broadway producer named Wood, and his secretary, a Homer Erskine, are engaged in their usual foreplay, while the driver, Ames, has to avoid a tree blocking the road. Forced to slog their way to a nearby house, the real question raises its head from the muck:
Is this just a house, or is it a one night only theater, purely for the seduction of Wood and his production company?
That’s The Ghost Walks’s (1934) beginning.
And it leads to an important question: If a character dies, does it matter? What if the actor portraying the character is also dead? Is it fidelity to her art?
And then her body disappears? Negative points, maybe?
For all that the script needed refinement, that the tension between Wood and Erskine is just a trifle repetitive, this is actually a bit of unexpected fun. It wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but it did make me smile unexpectedly, even at the climactic plot twist.
And now we’ll need everyone to go push the car out of the muck.
