I seem to remember
2021-06-22 04:45I do not hold it too strongly against Three Live Ghosts (1936) that having now seen it, I am mostly interested in other versions of the story. A day ago, I had no idea any of them existed.
Specifically, I watched the film because it looked like my only available window on a piece of pop culture which had completely passed me and most audiences of the last eight decades by. Beginning as a novel by Frederic Stewart Isham in 1918, Three Live Ghosts was successively adapted for the stage in 1920, the silent screen in 1922, the talkies in 1929, and finally Code-era Hollywood in 1936, retaining through each iteration the central conceit of three soldiers gone missing in action on the Western Front who tramp their way back to Blighty just in time for the Armistice and the Helleresque discovery that they have been recorded not as prisoners of war but killed in action, rendering them officially "dead—under the ground—pushing up the daisies" and thus, despite their protestations to the sergeant and the contrary, s.o.l. when it comes to the question of back pay. Even the proper dead get a couple of pennies apiece. Our heroes have to settle for a shilling doled out by a chary relative rather than the King. Then again, there are certain advantages accruing to their spectral state, or more accurately certain disadvantages entailed in their potential resurrection. There's the trouble a mother could get into, collecting a year of death benefits on a son who's alive and well and living in Whitechapel. There's the attention of American detectives, which might revive if their quarry were determined not to have gone west after all. There's the absurdity of reinstating the identity of a shell-shock case when even he can't remember who he's supposed to be. "Three live ghosts," the most grounded of the soldiers disgustedly sums up their situation, "and one of them out of commission!" Throw in a couple of love interests, a £1000 MacGuffin, and just for good measure a semi-stolen baby, and the stage is more than set for a collision of cross-talk at cross purposes until all the reversals and recognitions sort themselves out in the happy end. I figured if the property had endured through multiple generations of different art forms, odds were better than not there was something in it.
Speaking for myself, what's in it is Claud Allister, but the rest of the cast acquit themselves honorably in the main. As the no-nonsense Jimmie Gubbins and his innocently wily mother, Charles McNaughton and Beryl Mercer had originated their parts on Broadway and reprised them for the pre-Code film and by this last go-round had their double act down to a science, with the "old sweetheart" of Mrs. Gubbins tranquilly winding up her son as he strives manfully to keep a lid on the shemozzle until the police come calling and then they close ranks with the overlapping ease of old confederates, playing up to one another's stories and triumphantly agreeing on the trump card of his ghosthood. As Bill Jones who has been assiduously avoiding all inquiries connected with the name of William Foster, Richard Arlen has the romance angle covered with his self-sacrificing consent to be turned in for the reward if half of it can be secretly passed on to Cecilia Parker's Ann Gordon, the commercial painter he left behind him and really should have guessed would reproach him once the gaff was blown, "Bill, do you think I'd take any of that money?" Last and superficially least of the three spirits comes Allister as the aforementioned shock case known only as—in the older meaning of nonsense rather than parody—"Spoofy." He has an engagingly sweet, fey smile and an absentminded habit of pocketing small items and trying on other people's hats; his "foraging" saved their necks more than once on the run in Europe, but he can't seem to be cured of it back home, where it may be doubtful that he properly he understands he is. Jimmie is forever confiscating snapped-up trifles with understandable exasperation: "What are you swiping a nutmeg grater for?" Reluctantly relinquishing his treasures, Spoofy defends himself, "Oh, I'm not particular." Allister's screen career was founded on the archetype of the upper-crust silly ass and Spoofy with his brightly drawling exclamations of "Bravo" and "Rather" registers as a cracked variation thereof, lanky and straw-haired, his long clown-boned face apparently capable of expressing either vacuity or fatuity, but if asked for both at once it might get confused. He kisses Mrs. Gubbins' hand as elegantly as an embassy ball and folds up his long legs like a child when he settles behind the fringe-draped table for a nip of her gin. Asked for his name in the paymaster-sergeant's office, he gives the chipper answer, "None of your bally business!" and dodges his comrades just in time to pitch the man's own cap back at him as neatly as a ring toss. Ann's assured of his harmlessness when he wanders into her studio for a game of noughts and crosses and a spot of kleptomania, but he does even more than Jimmie's mother to land them all in the soup when he returns from a night's foray with a perambulator of some pedigree and a swell suit of clothes and their respective contents of a baby, a heap of banknotes, and at least a duke's ransom in jewels. "He's robbed the Bank of England!" breathes the landlady's wide-eyed daughter, Nydia Westman's Peggy Woofers. In point of fact he's robbed a town house in the West End and the film loses something in both pace and punch by showing us as much, because as enjoyable as it is to watch Spoofy potter around feloniously with his moon-mild expression, I suspect it would be dramatically funnier and more effective for the audience to be stuck waiting with his comrades as they fret over his absence—knowing that the longer he's off the leash, the shorter the odds of their fragile scrounger embroiling himself in some outrageous pickle—and receive with them the full impact of his untelegraphed return. The film has been evidently opened out from the play and at the risk of sounding like a cinema Luddite, I'm not sure it always serves the material well. Some of the alterations are neutral to charming, such as introducing the three ghosts swinging arm-in-arm through London to a soldiers' song straight out of Fragments from France: The ASC gets strawberry jam and rations of rum, but we poor blokes, we only get apple and plum! Some of them, especially in the last act, really gum up the rhythms of the farce.
There is one portion of the film's denouement that could never have worked onstage and it fascinates me in part because it's spliced so unpredictably into the comedy when it might as well have been borrowed from an adaptation of Random Harvest (1941). In the best traditions of fiction as opposed to medicine, Spoofy's smashed-up memory is restored when he receives a truncheon to the head courtesy of resisting arrest; dropped as helplessly loose-limbed into a chair as a well-dressed scarecrow, berated by Dudley Digges' Inspector Briggs over the provenance of the jewels, he twitches and protests feebly until something in the question touches a deeper nerve than the blustering inspector intended and it suddenly dawns on us that his face is dazed, not vacant, his voice even through pain focusing more than the familiar top-storeyed transmissions from no man's cloud-cuckoo-land. "Wait," he murmurs, "I seem to remember . . ." and as he does we watch the clamorous smoke-ridden montage of it, the trenches at night with the whizz-bangs whistling over, the fair-haired officer with the silly face and the steady voice reassuring his men as they prepare to go over the top, the charge, the explosions, the crater into which the officer is blown off his feet and out of his mind, all playing out under a ghostly close-up of the man we know as Spoofy, as if he's the glass we're darkly looking through. His friends' hands grip his shoulders as he whispers and orders, ventriloquizes his forgotten self, half faints at the stricken moment. When it's done, he's wincing, lucid, able to recollect and identify both the buddies who looked after him in the prison camp and the fistfuls of jewels still being shaken in his face, at which Jimmie groans, bumping the anagnorisis back to earth, "Blimey, just when he should stay crazy, he goes and gets his brains back!" It's pure cinema and it works beautifully, for once justifying the film's digressions from the machinery of farce. It would have worked just as well in a silent movie and I have no idea if it did.
The 1936 Three Live Ghosts was co-written by Isham with C. Gardner Sullivan, directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, and photographed by James Wong Howe, and while I don't regret the hour it took out of my time, I am desperately curious about its predecessors. Whether they were faster, stagier, more freely adapted, there's enough in this version that feels mucked about with that I want some points of comparison. I have my fingers crossed most fervently for the pre-Code, not least because its cast includes Joan Bennett and Robert Montgomery, more academically because the contrasts on either side of Code enforcement have never failed to be instructive regardless of which version I prefer; the silent may have to wait until a print surfaces that isn't an anti-capitalist Soviet re-edit, I kid you not. I remain mildly surprised the story wasn't remade one last time in the wake of World War II, since nothing about the stupidity of military bureaucracy has dated in the history of warfare and film noir features more instances of trauma-induced amnesia than you can forget to count, but it truly seems to have dropped out of the zeitgeist. So have many more intriguing or irreplaceable narratives, of course, but this happens to be the one I sat down to watch because I'd never heard of it and now I don't know when I'll get the damnably catchy jingle of "Plum and Apple" out of my head. I don't even think Ticklers jam exists anymore. What a ghost to get stuck with. This commission brought to you by my live backers at Patreon.
Specifically, I watched the film because it looked like my only available window on a piece of pop culture which had completely passed me and most audiences of the last eight decades by. Beginning as a novel by Frederic Stewart Isham in 1918, Three Live Ghosts was successively adapted for the stage in 1920, the silent screen in 1922, the talkies in 1929, and finally Code-era Hollywood in 1936, retaining through each iteration the central conceit of three soldiers gone missing in action on the Western Front who tramp their way back to Blighty just in time for the Armistice and the Helleresque discovery that they have been recorded not as prisoners of war but killed in action, rendering them officially "dead—under the ground—pushing up the daisies" and thus, despite their protestations to the sergeant and the contrary, s.o.l. when it comes to the question of back pay. Even the proper dead get a couple of pennies apiece. Our heroes have to settle for a shilling doled out by a chary relative rather than the King. Then again, there are certain advantages accruing to their spectral state, or more accurately certain disadvantages entailed in their potential resurrection. There's the trouble a mother could get into, collecting a year of death benefits on a son who's alive and well and living in Whitechapel. There's the attention of American detectives, which might revive if their quarry were determined not to have gone west after all. There's the absurdity of reinstating the identity of a shell-shock case when even he can't remember who he's supposed to be. "Three live ghosts," the most grounded of the soldiers disgustedly sums up their situation, "and one of them out of commission!" Throw in a couple of love interests, a £1000 MacGuffin, and just for good measure a semi-stolen baby, and the stage is more than set for a collision of cross-talk at cross purposes until all the reversals and recognitions sort themselves out in the happy end. I figured if the property had endured through multiple generations of different art forms, odds were better than not there was something in it.
Speaking for myself, what's in it is Claud Allister, but the rest of the cast acquit themselves honorably in the main. As the no-nonsense Jimmie Gubbins and his innocently wily mother, Charles McNaughton and Beryl Mercer had originated their parts on Broadway and reprised them for the pre-Code film and by this last go-round had their double act down to a science, with the "old sweetheart" of Mrs. Gubbins tranquilly winding up her son as he strives manfully to keep a lid on the shemozzle until the police come calling and then they close ranks with the overlapping ease of old confederates, playing up to one another's stories and triumphantly agreeing on the trump card of his ghosthood. As Bill Jones who has been assiduously avoiding all inquiries connected with the name of William Foster, Richard Arlen has the romance angle covered with his self-sacrificing consent to be turned in for the reward if half of it can be secretly passed on to Cecilia Parker's Ann Gordon, the commercial painter he left behind him and really should have guessed would reproach him once the gaff was blown, "Bill, do you think I'd take any of that money?" Last and superficially least of the three spirits comes Allister as the aforementioned shock case known only as—in the older meaning of nonsense rather than parody—"Spoofy." He has an engagingly sweet, fey smile and an absentminded habit of pocketing small items and trying on other people's hats; his "foraging" saved their necks more than once on the run in Europe, but he can't seem to be cured of it back home, where it may be doubtful that he properly he understands he is. Jimmie is forever confiscating snapped-up trifles with understandable exasperation: "What are you swiping a nutmeg grater for?" Reluctantly relinquishing his treasures, Spoofy defends himself, "Oh, I'm not particular." Allister's screen career was founded on the archetype of the upper-crust silly ass and Spoofy with his brightly drawling exclamations of "Bravo" and "Rather" registers as a cracked variation thereof, lanky and straw-haired, his long clown-boned face apparently capable of expressing either vacuity or fatuity, but if asked for both at once it might get confused. He kisses Mrs. Gubbins' hand as elegantly as an embassy ball and folds up his long legs like a child when he settles behind the fringe-draped table for a nip of her gin. Asked for his name in the paymaster-sergeant's office, he gives the chipper answer, "None of your bally business!" and dodges his comrades just in time to pitch the man's own cap back at him as neatly as a ring toss. Ann's assured of his harmlessness when he wanders into her studio for a game of noughts and crosses and a spot of kleptomania, but he does even more than Jimmie's mother to land them all in the soup when he returns from a night's foray with a perambulator of some pedigree and a swell suit of clothes and their respective contents of a baby, a heap of banknotes, and at least a duke's ransom in jewels. "He's robbed the Bank of England!" breathes the landlady's wide-eyed daughter, Nydia Westman's Peggy Woofers. In point of fact he's robbed a town house in the West End and the film loses something in both pace and punch by showing us as much, because as enjoyable as it is to watch Spoofy potter around feloniously with his moon-mild expression, I suspect it would be dramatically funnier and more effective for the audience to be stuck waiting with his comrades as they fret over his absence—knowing that the longer he's off the leash, the shorter the odds of their fragile scrounger embroiling himself in some outrageous pickle—and receive with them the full impact of his untelegraphed return. The film has been evidently opened out from the play and at the risk of sounding like a cinema Luddite, I'm not sure it always serves the material well. Some of the alterations are neutral to charming, such as introducing the three ghosts swinging arm-in-arm through London to a soldiers' song straight out of Fragments from France: The ASC gets strawberry jam and rations of rum, but we poor blokes, we only get apple and plum! Some of them, especially in the last act, really gum up the rhythms of the farce.
There is one portion of the film's denouement that could never have worked onstage and it fascinates me in part because it's spliced so unpredictably into the comedy when it might as well have been borrowed from an adaptation of Random Harvest (1941). In the best traditions of fiction as opposed to medicine, Spoofy's smashed-up memory is restored when he receives a truncheon to the head courtesy of resisting arrest; dropped as helplessly loose-limbed into a chair as a well-dressed scarecrow, berated by Dudley Digges' Inspector Briggs over the provenance of the jewels, he twitches and protests feebly until something in the question touches a deeper nerve than the blustering inspector intended and it suddenly dawns on us that his face is dazed, not vacant, his voice even through pain focusing more than the familiar top-storeyed transmissions from no man's cloud-cuckoo-land. "Wait," he murmurs, "I seem to remember . . ." and as he does we watch the clamorous smoke-ridden montage of it, the trenches at night with the whizz-bangs whistling over, the fair-haired officer with the silly face and the steady voice reassuring his men as they prepare to go over the top, the charge, the explosions, the crater into which the officer is blown off his feet and out of his mind, all playing out under a ghostly close-up of the man we know as Spoofy, as if he's the glass we're darkly looking through. His friends' hands grip his shoulders as he whispers and orders, ventriloquizes his forgotten self, half faints at the stricken moment. When it's done, he's wincing, lucid, able to recollect and identify both the buddies who looked after him in the prison camp and the fistfuls of jewels still being shaken in his face, at which Jimmie groans, bumping the anagnorisis back to earth, "Blimey, just when he should stay crazy, he goes and gets his brains back!" It's pure cinema and it works beautifully, for once justifying the film's digressions from the machinery of farce. It would have worked just as well in a silent movie and I have no idea if it did.
The 1936 Three Live Ghosts was co-written by Isham with C. Gardner Sullivan, directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, and photographed by James Wong Howe, and while I don't regret the hour it took out of my time, I am desperately curious about its predecessors. Whether they were faster, stagier, more freely adapted, there's enough in this version that feels mucked about with that I want some points of comparison. I have my fingers crossed most fervently for the pre-Code, not least because its cast includes Joan Bennett and Robert Montgomery, more academically because the contrasts on either side of Code enforcement have never failed to be instructive regardless of which version I prefer; the silent may have to wait until a print surfaces that isn't an anti-capitalist Soviet re-edit, I kid you not. I remain mildly surprised the story wasn't remade one last time in the wake of World War II, since nothing about the stupidity of military bureaucracy has dated in the history of warfare and film noir features more instances of trauma-induced amnesia than you can forget to count, but it truly seems to have dropped out of the zeitgeist. So have many more intriguing or irreplaceable narratives, of course, but this happens to be the one I sat down to watch because I'd never heard of it and now I don't know when I'll get the damnably catchy jingle of "Plum and Apple" out of my head. I don't even think Ticklers jam exists anymore. What a ghost to get stuck with. This commission brought to you by my live backers at Patreon.
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