The truly seminal horror/black comedy romp "fear"-turing classic horror film icons is, of course, the wildly funny (and perverse) Arsenic And Old Lace, with Boris Karloff appearing in the Broadway version and Peter Lorre appearing in the film version.  However, before Arsenic was released, the movie-going public was treated to another horror/ black comedy outing that managed to bring Karloff and Lorre together.  While such a "funny" fright flick should be a well-regarded and well-regaled item today, it is, instead, mostly ignored.  The problem is that the film has some creaking weaknesses in plot, characterization, and pacing, which means that...

By JOE WINTERS

Bodies in the cellar…strange medical experiments… Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre together again. All that could add up to something pretty serious, right? Well, 1942’s The Boogie Man Will Get You is anything but. So, is it seriously funny? You be the judge.

The main title music is the bouncy kind with slide whistles to indicate scare comedy, and our story opens at the Billings Tavern, a run down bed & breakfast style establishment that, as a sign indicates, is for sale very cheap. Housekeeper Amelia (Maude Eburne) sweeps dust under the carpet as she listens to "The Poultry Hour" on the radio. Amelia is a few chickens shy of a hen house. In fact, she dreams of buying a hen house, even though she has no chickens.

Meanwhile, from the basement emerges Professor Nathaniel Billings (Boris Karloff), a distracted, soft-spoken man taking a break from his current experiment to get an apple for his latest human guinea pig.

Prospective buyer Winnie Slade (Jeff Donnell) arrives and she’s actually delighted at the house’s defects. Amelia introduces Nathaniel as "doctor of biochemistry at Century College…before it went under." When asked to elaborate on his work, the Professor replies that he’s "merely toying with a few physio-dynamics, shaking the unshakable laws of existence, so to speak, and…gracious, the apple!" Returning to his experiment, subject Number 5 is soon, in the Professor’s words, "cold as a mackerel…dear, dear, dear."

Holding the mortgage (at 23 and-a-half percent compounded semi-annual interest!) on the house is Dr. Lorencz (Peter Lorre). In addition to arranging loans, he’s the town’s mayor, sheriff, justice of the peace, coroner, notary public and insurance man. He once made a fortune on bogus hair-restorer and carries a Siamese kitten in his coat pocket.

Before Winnie’s boyfriend Bill (Larry Parks) can talk her out of buying the house, she’s signed the agreement and paid Lorencz who promptly charges a 25 cents notary fee.

Amidst newly arrived guests, the ranting of handyman and pig keeper Ebenezer (George McKay) and the occasional screams of the unseen Uncas, who may or may not be a ghost, Bill finds a body on the floor of the lab. Bill goes to Lorencz who instantly equips himself with gun and sheriff’s badge.

Lorencz interrogates the Professor and sees dollar signs at the prospect of manufactured supermen that Billings says he can create for the war effort. The two put failure Number 5 with the other perfectly preserved "simple men who have chosen to be martyrs to a great cause." Coroner Lorencz compliments the Professor for outmoding formaldehyde and urges him to make bothersome Bill the next subject.

The plan changes when unlikely powder puff salesman Maxie (Maxie Rosenbloom) arrives. The big guy faints at being offered 20 dollars for all his wares, and later revives and volunteers for the experiment with a guarantee of losing his inferiority complex. He even goes out to steal some anesthetic.

Meanwhile, houseguest Mr. Brampton (Don Beddoe) is searching the house, tapping on floors and appearing suspicious. Lorencz’s kitten has, according to its owner, "the most amazing instinct for crime and corruption" and leads him and the Professor to another guest, this one with a knife in his back! They go for help, but when they get back, the body is gone!

Maxie shows up with the anesthetic, but can’t smell it for his blocked sinuses. Lorencz and the Professor take a whiff and pass out. Winnie and Bill take a whiff and pass out. Maxie now thinks he’s a wholesale murderer, yells for his Mama and runs off.

Lorencz and the Professor revive in time to meet the newest arrival, Sylvio (Frank Puglia), a self-described human bomb, escaped from a Canadian prison. Meanwhile Bill and Winnie revive in the cellar among the covered bodies. Maxie returns and volunteers to be conked out with a blunt object so the experiment can proceed. As a superman he might be able to overpower the mad Sylvio.

Brampton pops his head through a secret panel in the body room, turns back and is followed by Bill and Winnie. Bill calls the police. They soon find Brampton unconscious, the victim of a foiled knife attack (the blade is deflected by Brampton’s whalebone corset).

It turns out he’s an historian who offers Winnie $20,000 for the house. It also turns out that Amelia had tried to kill Brampton to steal the money for her hen house. And it is revealed that Ebenezer did knife the other guest for money. Electrical noises bring everyone to the basement lab where Maxie slumps out of the cabinet unconscious as Sylvio lights a fuse bomb.

Suddenly in walk the shroud-covered "corpses." The bomb turns out to be a dud, the "corpses" turn out to have been in suspended animation, and everyone is promised a trip to Idlewild Sanitarium. Lorencz re-assures his old friend. "Don’t worry, Professor. I’m the chairman of the board of directors up there."

While that line was probably in the script, Peter Lorre’s tendency to ad-lib bits of comic business throughout filming might have annoyed Karloff who was very much a stick-to-the-script sort of chap, but it’s those little Lorre moments that give the movie so much of its nutty charm.

Having made his mark in such thrillers as M (1931), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and Mad Love (MGM, 1935), Hungarian-born Lorre signed with Twentieth Century Fox where he was cast as Japanese detective Mr. Moto in a series of films from 1937 through 1939. Before Lorre could be cast in Fox’s The Gorilla (1939) he got out of his contract and went freelance. He was originally intended to play the role of Wolf Von Frankenstein in Universal’s Son Of Frankenstein (1939), but Basil Rathbone got the part instead.

Soon, at Columbia, Lorre played a sadistic villain in Island Of Doomed Men (1940) and a sympathetic one in The Face Behind The Mask (1941). At RKO, he was the quietly psychotic Strangler On The Third Floor (1940). Lorre and Karloff had met a few times prior to their first teaming in You’ll Find Out (RKO, 1940) where they hit it off and became friends for life (we covered that film in HORROR-WOOD here). As in the Moto films, the light comical shadings that Lorre had brought to his otherwise deadly villainous roles in Hitchcock’s The Secret Agent (1936) and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (Warner Brothers, 1941) served him well in The Boogie Man Will Get You.

Boris Karloff had already starred in four serious mad doctor movies at Columbia, including The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), The Man With Nine Lives (1940), Before I Hang (1940) and The Devil Commands (1941). Right after wrapping the latter in late 1940, Boris was off to New York and the soon-to-be Broadway smash Arsenic And Old Lace (1940). The play was so successful that Warner Brothers bought the movie rights, filmed it in 1941, but couldn’t release it until the play closed on Broadway, which it finally did in 1944. Karloff did not appear in the film due to his own commitment to appear in the play. The role of the murderous Jonathan Brewster went instead to Raymond Massey. Also in the film was Peter Lorre, again quite funny as Jonathan’s plastic surgeon sidekick.

Karloff got a leave of absence in the summer of ‘42 to finish his short-term contract with Columbia. Intending to capitalize on Karloff’s current stage success, the studio cast him as Professor Billings in The Boogie Man Will Get You. Meanwhile Erich Von Stroheim, who had played Jonathan Brewster on the Chicago stage since mid 1941, pinch-hit for Boris on Broadway. Bela Lugosi played Jonathan in a touring road show during the early 1940s, and a few critics actually favored Lugosi’s portrayal over Karloff’s. Nevertheless, Boris re-joined the New York company for a 66-week national tour of Arsenic And Old Lace. He and Lorre would finally appear in the play together on a 1955 TV presentation.

While it does pile on the comic subplots, The Boogie Man Will Get You is no Arsenic And Old Lace, but it does present a change of pace film role for Karloff and an early indication of his own flair for comedy and self parody. These talents would serve him on stage as Captain Hook in Peter Pan and in several films and TV appearances, including a guest role in drag as elderly bad gal Mother Muffin on The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.

The Boogie Man Will Get You was directed by Lew Landers (1901-1962), known during the mid 1930’s as Louis Friedlander when he directed Boris and Bela in The Raven (Universal, 1935). Among his hundred and fifty or so "B" pictures, Landers directed Lugosi in Return Of The Vampire (Columbia, 1944), and Von Stroheim in The Mask Of Dijon (PRC, 1946). Among Lew’s other mystery movies were Seven Keys To Baldpate (1947) and Inner Sanctum (1948).

Besides Karloff and Lorre, much of the The Boogie Man Will Get You cast had some prior and future mystery and horror film experience. Larry Parks (1914-1975) was in director Landers’ Mystery Ship (1941) before moving on to bigger things and an Academy Award nomination for playing Al Jolson in The Jolson Story (1946). (Miss) Jeff Donnell (1921-1988) would later in life play Aunt May in TV’s Amazing Spider-Man (1977).

Maude Eburne (1875-1960), a reliable old hand at scare comedy in The Bat Whispers (1931) and The Vampire Bat (1933), brought humor to yet another pair of mystery thrillers, The Leavenworth Case (1936) and Among The Living (1941).

George McKay (1884-1945) was a regular at Columbia with roles in Island Of Doomed Men (1940), Before I Hang (1940), The Face Behind The Mask (1941), The Devil Commands (1941) and Return Of The Vampire (1944).

Among his nearly 200 film roles, Don Beddoe (1903-1991) took part in The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), Beware Spooks! (1940), Island Of Doomed Men (1940), Midnight Manhunt (PRC, 1945), and later in Jack The Giant Killer (1962) as well as a hundred or so TV shows.

The work of Frank Puglia (1892-1975) ranges from roles in Phantom Of The Opera (Universal, 1943) to Twenty Million Miles To Earth (Columbia, 1957), among others, while "Slapsie Maxie" Rosenbloom (1904-1976) would show up in I Married A Monster From Outer Space at Columbia in 1958.

Though they teamed several more times, Karloff and Lorre never appeared together in a straightforward horror or dramatic film. Separately they delivered the chills. Together they delivered the chuckles, as in TV’s Route 66 episode "Lizard’s Leg and Owlet’s Wing" with Lon Chaney Jr. On the big screen, Karloff and Lorre were together again in American International’s The Raven (1963) and The Comedy Of Terrors (1964), both with Vincent Price and the latter with Basil Rathbone as well.

And as in The Boogie Man Will Get You, old fiends having fun were, and are, among the many joys of life in HORROR-WOOD.

Thanks, Joe.  Even though The Boogie Man Will Get You was released to theaters years before Arsenic And Old Lace, it still comes off as a riff on Arsenic, and a particularly weak riff at that.  The black humor is too forced, the characters all act a bit too screwy to be real (even in a film sense), and most of the cast looks more confused than frightened.  Still, this flick does team up Karloff and Lorre and gives them considerable screen time, both separately and together, and they shine in their performances.  Some fans of the two will no doubt find this movie disappointing.  However, as long as your expectations aren't too high, you might well discover that this "Boogie" meets your fright film "groove thang."

Article copyright © Joe Winters

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