|
|
Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 10, No. 43 |
|
"ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY"
|
A 'zombie comedy' kept
Lugosi working in 1945
of TheColumnists.com
The very first "zombie" movie I ever saw or, as a matter of fact, even heard of was RKO's 1945 comedy "Zombies on Broadway," which certainly had one of the great movie titles of all time.
My best friend in the third grade was Buddy Bohannon. He had been taken to see "Zombies on Broadway" when it came out in 1945. I hadn't even heard of the movie, but, even if I had, I probably wouldn't have seen it. In those days, I only went to movies with my parents--and there's no chance my Mom ever would have paid good money to see something with that title.
It didn't matter anyhow because Buddy told me the entire movie, so I felt I knew it by heart when I finally saw it on television on the late show in the early 1950s. But for maybe as long as eight years, I longed for a chance to see it myself. It just sounded so....well,...good!
Okay, I now own a copy of "Zombies on Broadway" and I revisited it this week so I could include it in my ongoing report on all the zombie movies ever made. Now I'm inclined to agree it's probably "pretty goofy," as Wally Cleaver might tell his little brother, The Beaver. Still, I have this nostalgic feeling about it because I can still hear Buddy's enthusiasm as he told me about seeing it in 1945.
On the plus side, it has a great premise: Two New York City publicity men--Jerry (Wally Brown) and Mike (Alan Carney)--have dreamed up a surefire gimmick to draw a crowd to the opening night of a new Gotham night club called The Zombie Hut. The gimmick? They've promised to have a "real live zombie" there for the opening celebration. They've even hired a big black guy named Sam to put makeup on and play the zombie.
"Nobody's ever seen a zombie," they reason, "so how are they gonna know Sam isn't one?"
But their boss, retired gangster "Ace" Miller (Sheldon Leonard), is worried that a nasty Broadway columnist (Louis Jean Heydt) is going to queer the deal by "outing" the fake zombie and fingering "Ace" as a scam artist trying to bilk the public. So, he tells Jerry and Mike, they either have to come up with a "real" zombie or he'll take them for a boat ride where they can swim with the fishes.
Where could you round up a "real" zombie in 1945? Well, the boys figure the International Museum might be a good place to start, so they go there after hours and ask a half-baked scientist on the premises if he knows where they can find a zombie. Turns out he has a possible source: His old college classmate, Dr. Renault, did research on zombies while they were in school together. If Renault is still living on the Caribbean island of San Sebastian, where zombies were rumored to exist, he might help them out.
With less than a month to acquire a zombie, the boys ship out immediately for San Sebastian--and, as luck would have it, Dr. Renault (Bela Lugosi) is still living there, working very hard to find a way to create zombies in his mad lab, using a serum to duplicate what the local natives do with good old-fashioned voodoo. So far, he's managed to turn living people into dead people, but he's having lots of trouble getting them to walk around after that.
In the early 1940s, RKO was making lots of good movies--think Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" (1941) and "Magnificent Ambersons" (1942)--but also making loads of "B" pictures of dubious value. One of the studio's main goals seemed to be copying some of the formulas that rival Universal had created.
For one thing, RKO had commissioned producer Val Lewton to make a series of horror movies like the lucrative series Universal had going, such as "Frankenstein," "The Mummy" and "The Invisible Man." He came up with some classics, such as "The Cat People" and"The Seventh Victim," although they didn't make the same profits the Universal films made.
RKO also w;as trying to clone Universal's Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, comedy team, then the biggest comedy franchise in Hollywood. So they put Wally Brown (thin, Abbott-like) and Alan Carney (chubby, Costello-like) into a series of "B" comedies. Brown & Carney didn't work and "Zombies on Broadway" was one of their last attempts to make the grade.
Bela Lugosi was then way past his "Dracula" box office prime, but he was still viable enough to "star" in low-grade horror movies made by the "poverty row" studios Monogram, Republic and PRC. At major studios like RKO, he mainly played supporting roles like Dr. Renault in "Zombies on Broadway." (His final film at RKO would be another Brown & Carney horror comedy, "Genius At Work," also their final comedy for RKO, released in 1946.)
Looked at in any rational manner, "Zombies on Broadway" was a turkey. Yet I have several reasons why I'll always kind of like it.
First, I think it made use of a lot of the wonderful sets Val Lewton used in the best zombie movie of the 1940s--RKO's 1943 "I Walked Wtih A Zombie." The Brown-Carney film also made use of two marvelous supporting players from that same Lewton film: Calypso singer Sir Lancelot, who sings a little song warning Brown & Carney what they're getting into when they land on San Sebastian, and Darby Jones, the tall, bug-eyed African-American actor who was the scariest-looking zombie of his era.
It also has a very special leading lady--Anne Jeffreys--who plays a cafe singer on San Sebastian that Dr. Renault plans on turning into a zombie. Jeffreys today is best remembered for playing the sexy ghost in TV's "Topper" series, but she was once a Powers model, an opera singer who performed in both New York and Los Angeles opera companies, a movie leading lady in 47 films, a Broadway performer, a TV soap opera star ("Bright Promise") and a regular guest star on all kinds of TV shows.
And I think "Zombies on Broadway" winds up having a pretty amusing finale, too, as the Zombie Hut opens on schedule--with a "real, live" zombie as promised. You'll never guess where the zombie comes from--and I won't spoil the fun for you either. Who knows, if Buddy Bohannon is still alive somewhere, he may still be telling people he meets about what happens in "Zombies on Broadway."
©2009 by Ron Miller. The photos are courtesy of Turner Classic Movies and RKO. This column first posted Nov. 30, 2009.
TO READ THE FIRST TWO COLUMNS IN RON'S ZOMBIE ROUND-UP SERIES, CLICK HERE:
|
|
|
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|