Chasing Fake Ghosts with a Real Ghost

 Dan Aykroyd has mentioned the 1951 Bowery Boys movie Ghost Chasers (along with Abbott and Costello's Hold That Ghost and Bob Hope's The Ghost Breakers) as influences for Ghostbusters. It was these three early films that inspired the idea of setting a comedic ghost story in a modern setting.

Ghost Chasers' influence on Ghostbusters is simply thematic. In terms of plot and character, any simularities are tenouos at best. But if you like the Bowery Boys during their later comedic phase (and I do) then its a fun and funny film. As was standard for their films, Ghost Chasers depends on the malaproprisms of Slip (Leo Gorcey) and the stupidity-based slapstick of Sach (Huntz Hall) for humor. This includes a wonderful scene in which Slip is instructing a poor girl in proper diction. 

The plot involves the boys plotting to expose a fake spiritualist. I love the way they get involved in this. A lady living in the apartment next door to slip is feeling down because she had lost her son in the war. Slip stops by just to let her prepare him a meal, knowing that this would make her feel better. (She's Italian.) When Slip finds out she's being conned by a spiritualist who claims to be able to talk to her son, he immediately comes up with a plan to stop this. The Bowery Boys films are without question light-weight fluff, but stuff like this gives the series a real heart.

It soon turns out that there's a real ghost hanging around--sent down from the afterlife to also help expose the spiritualists. Edgar Alden Franklin Smith (a Pilgrim-era man) is played to perfection by character actor Lloyd Corrigan, who speaks in King James English and endows Edgar with charm and likeability.

Edgar has several handy abilities, including being able to teleport quickly from one spot to another and make doors appear in walls by sketching out the door in chalk. The trouble is that only Sach can see and hear him, causing the other boys to think that poor Sach may finally be going off the deep edge he's been toddering along for years. 

There's a lot of great slapstick involved in the effort to nail the bad guys, including futile attempts to escape from a death trap (they need to be saved by Edgar) and a wonderful sequence in which the boys are frozen in mid-motion by a hypnotist. In the end, though, it works out and the bad guys are foiled. 

Well, I reviewed The Ghost Breakers a few years ago and now I've talked about Ghost Chasers. I suppose I should finish up the "They influenced Ghostbusters" trifecta with a look at Hold That Ghost.