The Smiling Ghost (Lewis Seiler, 1941)

The Smiling Ghost is both a charming and silly little movie with some excellent comedic zingers and another peek into the disturbed and contradictory psyche of the average white American. A horror-comedy-mystery-romance about an aw-shucks cornpone goodie-two-shoes living beyond his means and his black valet who are taken advantage of by a decadent wealthy family in an attempt to end a murderous ghost curse afflicting a string of fiancés of the family's granddaughter, the movie accurately depicts the wealthy as selfish, demented, careless, exploitative, cold, drunk, and/or living in their own little bubble. However, its treatment of the sole black character is racist and stereotypical, using him as a wide-eyed, knee-knocking, teeth-chattering, fast-running cowardly comic relief figure who's saddled with a subplot about an elderly member of the wealthy family wanting to collect and shrink the valet's head because he doesn't yet have a "Negroid" in his collection.

Lucky Downing (Wayne Morris) is a recent college graduate and aspiring engineer in an unnamed big city, though he's the kindhearted but naive small-town rube type. He's sort of like a composite of every character on Leave It to Beaver except Eddie Haskell. Despite his intense devotion to the study of engineering, he's unemployed and hiding out in his office/apartment with his pet cat, dodging the group of bill collectors who have amassed outside his door, waiting for him to step outside. Lucky's loyal valet Clarence (Willie Best), despite not having been paid for several months, continues to help Lucky by delivering provisions and correspondence through the window awning.

Lucky finally gets to leave his abode when he's summoned to a job interview at the office of the wealthy Bentley family's attorney. Grandmother Bentley (Helen Westley) wants to hire a handsome and strong young man who's willing to do "anything legal" for a mysterious purpose. Lucky says he's their man, but the old woman puts him through the paces, barking orders at him, telling him his haircut "was an inside job," looking him up and down, and making him turn around and walk back and forth like a movie producer auditioning an aspiring actress for the casting couch. After some negotiations about retaining the valet services of Clarence, Lucky gets the job, which consists of a month's work pretending to be the fiancé of Bentley's granddaughter, the heiress Elinor Bentley Fairchild (Alexis Smith), and staying at the Bentley family mansion a few hours from the city. He will be paid $1,000 for his trouble, which gets you a half a loaf of bread in our current Trumpconomy but is nearly $23,000 in 2026 bucks. Lucky doesn't bother to ask why the family needs someone to pretend to be Elinor's fiancé because he's a city version of a hick from the sticks and he's just happy to get some cash.

After a comedic misunderstanding at the train station leaves Lucky worse for wear, he meets Elinor and newspaper reporter Lil Barstow (Brenda Marshall), who covers the Bentley family as part of her beat. Elinor breaks Lil's camera and tells Lil to send her the bill, but Lucky apologizes and attempts to answer the reporter's questions before Elinor shuts it down. Lil takes an immediate romantic liking to Lucky, but he's too simple to realize it.

Elinor's private car delivers our gang to the Bentley mansion, where Lucky meets the rest of the family. Besides Grandmother Bentley, the only family member who's in on the ruse besides Elinor, the mansion's dwellers include Elinor's aunt Rose Fairchild (Lee Patrick), an acid-tongued seen-it-all type who is quick with a dryly withering putdown and jealous of Elinor, uncle Hilton Fairchild (Roland Drew), a cold man who immediately loses interest in Lucky when he finds out Lucky doesn't have experience owning and shooting guns, cousin Tennant Bentley (Richard Ainley), an alcoholic and nasty drunk, and great-uncle Ames Bentley (Charles Halton), a demented old freak obsessed with his collection of shrunken heads. To quote a Mr. Show sketch, what a collection of assholes. Helping Clarence in his valet duties is no-nonsense butler Norton (Alan Hale). Hale's son, Alan Hale Jr., played the Skipper on Gilligan's Island. Confusing Hale Sr. for Hale Jr., I spent the whole movie thinking, "My God, this is the oldest-looking twentysomething I've ever seen." In my defense, the Hales look very much alike and I'm a dumber man than I used to be.

Why would a rich and attractive young woman like Elinor need her grandmother to pay someone to pretend to be her fiancé? Lucky may not be curious about such things, or anything not related to engineering (Elinor: "What kind of a kiss do you prefer?" Lucky: "You mean there's more than one kind?"), but after he switches rooms with Tennant and someone attempts to murder Tennant in the night, he gets the inside dope from Lil, who's sneaking around outside the mansion trying to get a scoop. Lucky was so engrossed in the study of engineering that he failed to follow the hot local news, but Elinor's family fortune isn't the only thing bringing her local fame. She's known in the press as the Kiss of Death Girl because fiancé numero uno, Johnny Eggleston, drowned. Fiancé two, Paul Myron (David Bruce), is still alive but living in an iron lung after getting his chest crushed in a car accident he claims was caused by a creepy smiling ghost. Apparently, Elinor dropped Paul like a hot potato once he was disabled. The third time was not the charm for fiancé three, Alan Winters, who died after a cobra bit him on the 18th floor of a Boston hotel. Classic 18th floor Boston shit, am I right?

Lucky is the expendable bait, hired to lure the killer, possibly entrap him, and see if Lucky will be, to quote a Bob Dylan song title, the fourth time around. When Lucky hears this inside dope (that would have been outside dope if he'd read the damn papers), he decides he's going back to (unnamed) city, he do believe he's had enough. But ain't it just like Lucky's blues, Elinor tells him she's fallen in love with him for real, and he doesn't think twice, it's alright. He decides to stick around and give this thing a shot, but will he be knockin' on heaven's door before he can even cash that thousand-dollar check? It's not dark yet, but it's getting there. Oh mercy.

All kinds of shit goes down after this, including attempted murders, midnight crypt explorations, midnight weddings, love triangles, creepy smiling ghosts, iron lung bitterness, quality wisecracks, casual racism, hidden passageways, secret caverns, surprise twists, and more. I'm halfway shocked we didn't get a guy in a gorilla suit.

So, The Smiling Ghost. Willie Best is a talented performer, but he's stuck with another dumb racist part despite getting a few good comedic lines, though he and Morris have a genuine rapport. The rest of the movie holds up a lot better. It's hardly a classic, but the one-liners are funny, the killer is creepy, and the cast is charming and has good chemistry. I can't say this is a must-watch, but it's a fascinating curio of early '40s Hollywood.

   

 

Die Hard 2 (Renny Harlin, 1990)

In my Die Hard post last month, I urged all of us to get past the question of whether Die Hard is or is not a Christmas movie (it is and it isn't) and asked people to instead consider whether Die Hard is a slasher movie and, by extension, whether action movies are slasher movie subgenres in which the action hero is a version of both the slasher movie killer and final girl. Let's see how these questions apply to Die Hard 2.

Die Hard 2, like its predecessor, takes place during the Christmas season, and, also like its predecessor, was released in theaters in the summer (July 4, 1990), but Die Hard 2 looks a lot Christmas-ier than Die Hard. The setting changes from a skyscraper office party in sunny Los Angeles to Dulles Airport in snowy Washington, D.C., during a blizzard. The airport is covered in Christmas decorations, the luggage carousel is full of wrapped gifts, everyone wears winter clothing, eggnog is mentioned, and one of the action sequences involves a snowmobile chase. It's a freakin' winter wonderland over here. The Christmas spirit permeates Die Hard 2. On the other hand, most of the plot has nothing to do with Christmas, other than the holiday season making the airport and flight schedules busier. They could've done this same story on Thanksgiving or spring break or at any airport in any city that was hosting the Super Bowl or the Olympics.

My conclusion: Die Hard 2 is a Christmas movie, and Die Hard 2 is not a Christmas movie. Embrace the contradiction. You accept that this movie takes place at Dulles in D.C. even though it was filmed at various airports, military bases, and studio sets in Colorado, Michigan, and California. You accept that the terrorists shutting down the airport's communication system leaves the planes in the air helpless even though they could get information from hundreds of other nearby radio signals. You accept that John McClane faces a crazy madcap terrorist Christmas season showdown for the second time in two years in two completely different cities. Give that same leap of faith to a Christmas movie that is not a Christmas movie but is a Christmas movie but isn't a Christmas movie. Do it.

Admittedly, my slasher movie hypothesis is pretty shaky when it comes to Die Hard 2, despite John McClane (Bruce Willis) stabbing one of the baddies through the eye with an icicle and (accidentally) crushing another one. McClane does a hell of a lot less skulking around in this one, he gets a lot more help, and most of the villains are dispatched en masse in gun battles and explosions. Not very slasher-y, am I right? My larger point stands, but Die Hard 2 is not a shining example of action movie as bizarro-world slasher.

It is a shining example of the big-budget '80s/'90s Hollywood action movie. Despite repeating the first film's formula with a much stupider terrorist plot, the sequel is almost as fun. The action scenes are legitimately suspenseful and exciting, the returning actors retain their chemistry and charm, and director Renny Harlin (taking over for the first and third installment's John McTiernan, who was busy making The Hunt for Red October) has a real gift for handling big scenes in large locations with hundreds of individual moving parts. (I also love the scenes in all the weird airport nooks and crannies us passengers never get to see.) Especially in the hustling, bustling airport scenes, Harlin shows masterful skill at gracefully controlling a busy, chaotic visual space. It's thrilling stuff, enhanced by the shots of the empty, still expanse of the darkened runways after the landings are delayed.

Alan Rickman and his crew of Eurotrash hair-metal muscleheads are sorely missed, replaced in this installment with a gang of character-acting heavy hitters who don't get enough personality-defining moments, except for William Sadler's naked martial arts workout while watching the news. You know a guy's a coldblooded psycho in an '80s or early '90s movie when you get a scene of him exercising in the nude. While Die Hard's villains were thieves with vague ties to Communist revolutionaries, Die Harder's bad boys are an anti-Commie far-right ex-military militia planning to save their newly arrested anti-Commie drug lord boss from the plane transporting him to Dulles. Ah, Hollywood, always having it both ways.

Leading the operation is Stuart (the aforementioned Sadler, of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, Trespass, various Tales from the Crypt movies and TV episodes, and The Shawshank Redemption fame), and his crew includes Don Harvey (The Untouchables), Robert Patrick (Terminator 2), and a blink twice and you'll miss him John Leguizamo. '60s and '70s spaghetti western and giallo star Franco Nero, who's worked with almost everyone from Fassbinder to Tarantino, plays the drug kingpin Esperanza. The returning cast besides Willis includes Bonnie Bedelia (this time given a much better role with zippier dialogue despite being stuck on a plane), William Atherton (also stuck on the plane) and Sheila McCarthy (their journalist characters are both working in D.C. now in one of many plausible coincidences), and, in a cameo, Reginald VelJohnson. What about Argyle, man? Joining the cast as McClane's allies, foils, secret enemies, or eventual allies are Dennis Franz, John Amos, Art Evans, Fred Thompson, and Tom Bower. This is a solid group of character actors who have been in a dizzying array of high-quality (and low-quality) projects, and they get a lot more to do than Sadler and his boys.

Sadly, Die Hard 2 really drops the ball in the zinger department. John McClane in the first movie was loaded with action-movie quips that hit the sweet spot between dad-joke stupidity and screenwriter cleverness, and Willis knew how to deliver the goods. The quips in Die Hard 2 are so lame, tired, try-hard, and dumb-bad (as opposed to dumb-good) that even Willis can't get some of them over. Not even the return of "yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker" can save it. The best McClane dialogue is the simplest. When he launches himself out of an ejector seat into mid-air as a plane explodes underneath him, he drops a well-timed, humorously delivered "oh shiiiiittt." When "oh, shit" is your funniest quip, a dialogue punch-up is sorely needed. It's a minor complaint overall, but a missed opportunity to capture more of the first movie's flavor.

Die Hard 2 was director Harlin's first big Hollywood job and second hit. After making short films and TV commercials in his native Finland, he moved to the U.S. and debuted with low-budget action thriller Born American, followed by low-budget horror movie Prison (reviewed on this site many years ago) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. His other credits include The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (starring the insane lineup of Andrew "Dice" Clay, Wayne Newton, Gilbert Gottfried, Priscilla Presley, Morris Day, Vince Neil, David Patrick Kelly, Ed O'Neill, Robert Englund, Sheila E, Pamela Adlon, Kurt Loder, and Tone Loc), Cliffhanger, Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight with his then-wife Geena Davis, Deep Blue Sea, 12 Rounds (with John Cena), and The Strangers trilogy.