Finishing off the Karloff at Columbia set, therefore, with the satyr play after the serious business, to use a thoroughly overblown analogy… having made a string of straight SF/horrors, Karloff’s next film nearly two years later (during which time he was treading the boards in the original Arsenic and Old Lace) was a kind of parody of those films; with it being wartime by now, Karloff’s working on a race of supermen with which to fight the Nazis, and doing it from the basement of an 18th century tavern in the process of being sold and restored. Peter Lorre is the town sheriff (and everything else) investigating Karloff’s activities, but soon decides to get involved himself. But is murder afoot? Well, the ghost of a fictional character seems to be… This is thoroughly delightful stuff, possibly the most purely fun thing in this whole set, and probably a lot better than it had any right to be. The real star of the show, of course, is Lorre’s crime-detecting kitten, though obviously both Karloff and Lorre are having the time of their lives; notably, this film has probably the best nice young romantic couple of the series (the others mostly having been comparatively minor), being (Miss) Jeff Donnell and Larry Parks (speaking yet again of blacklist victims), the former as the new owner of the old inn and the latter as her ex-husband who gets suckered into assisting with her perhaps mad scheme to make the old tavern new and viable again. And former boxer Max Rosenbloom plays the sort of charming thickhead I gather he specialised in playing after boxing ended for him, as the powder puff salesman who gets involved with Karloff and Lorre for the apparent hell of it. The reminders that the US had finally deigned to join in a certain war are laid on a bit thick, and you can definitely accuse the plotting of being a bit loose, but there’s just something winning about the whole thing. Enjoyed this greatly.
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