The Ghost Walks (1934)

Mr Ames was taking two men on a trip to his house during a storm. It was to show his passengers Mr Woods and his secretary Mr Erskine a play he had written. The car he was driving has problems and they have to get out and walk. Nearby there is a big house.They make their way to the house and Mr Ames knows the people that own the house and some of the guest. One lady is the daughter of the owner of the house. She is Ames girlfriend. Throughout this movie the secretary Mr Erskine is funny, he is afraid of everything Many unexplained things happen in the house. A woman named Bernice talks to spirits. Supposedly Dr Kent is the lady's doctor. Bernice has mental problems. Later she comes out again has dinner and talks to a spirit.Mr Woods finds and reads pages of the play in a manuscript in a bedroom. He realizes this was all a gimmick and this was the play Ames wrote. Woods starts to laugh and thinks it is a good play. Mr Ames admits that he hired these actors to act out his play in front of Woods but now Beatrice the one who talks to spirits is dead and then her body disappears.Scary, funny and stupid. It turns out there are secret passages in the house. There is also a picture on the wall that has eyes that move. A guard comes to the house and tells the guest that a mental patient escaped nearby and he will stay in the house just in case the person goes there.The villain captures 4 people who he intends to operate on in the house where the secret passages and rooms are. He intends to change their, nose, face, chin etc.This movie is full of things that may or may not be part of Ames play but you get a few laughs out of it.

It's occasionally amusing -- a story about seven people in a "haunted house" on a stormy night. One by one, four of them disappear, evidently one of them murdered.There's a lot of shouting and carrying on. One of the characters -- the secretary of a Broadway producer -- is gay, and I'm glad because he gets most of the funny lines and bits of business. I suppose some people today would argue that the character's flamboyance is politically incorrect but I'm sure that if this were shown in the Castro Theater it would get belly laughs and applause.The plot is hardly worth going on about. I always enjoy the notion of a handful of people stuck in a country mansion during a fierce electrical storm but the writers have to DO something with the proposition. After all, it's not funny in itself. Neil Simon did an exceptional job with it in "Murder By Death," using some of the same hoary tactics. (Two living eyes stare out of a painting.) All of the acting is overdone. The lines are loud and the gestures theatrical, but the viewer will have to go easy on such weaknesses. It's 1934, and many of the actors of the period came from the stage. They had to shout to reach the balcony. On top of that, the huge, noisy cameras had to be enclosed in soundproof "blimps", as they were called, and the microphones hidden in vases, buttonholes, garter belts, and whatnot.It's worth a look, perhaps, but not two looks.

Some nice plot twists keep the viewer sitting up through this old dark house mystery featuring John Miljan as a playwright with a new play to read—a thriller, this time! Among a supporting cast of vaguely familiar faces, Richard Carle and Johnny Arthur lend comic relief as a Broadway producer and assistant accompanying Miljan. Producer Carle is constantly firing and un-firing assistant Arthur, which is cute but predictable; on another level entirely is their merry insistence for a good chunk of the film that the entire "mystery" taking place is part of Miljan's presentation of his new play, put on for their benefit!Nothing particularly unusual here, otherwise, but those of us who enjoy being trapped in a dark house on a stormy night with an escaped lunatic in the neighborhood will find an hour of fun. As a bonus, the final few minutes feature a couple of bursts of really ripe maniacal laughter.

The Ghost Walks is a nifty little mystery with a great twist, snappy dialog, and best of all a pansy played to the twittery hilt by character actor Johnny Arthur which never demeans or denigrates his character. Mr. Arthur is great in his role of Homer Erskine bringing great comic relief as the secretary of the Broadway producer Herman Wood, played by another great character actor Richard Carle.They play off of each other superbly.Although the acceptable words of the time sissy and cream puff are used to describe the character of Homer, it is never mean spirited or meant as denigration, and are not spoken by the manly males of the film but by his employer, who fires and rehires him every other scene and who displays an almost exasperated affection for his devoted employee.There is a great scene where Homer tells his boss that he has devoted the best years of his life to him and has been everything but a mother to him.The mystery angle of the film is very entertaining, and the twist at the end might just leave you in stitches.For a low budget poverty row picture, this film has superb set decoration and great costuming.Director Frank Strayer ably handles his cast and this film holds together much better than some of his other low budget mystery attempts, but he had a great script to work with and some wonderful actors to carry it through.This film is a must see for devotees of poverty row films, old dark house mysteries (they actually managed to work in the lines "It was a dark and stormy night)and it has the added bonus of being an early representation of a gay character in film where nothing bad happens to them in the end.This movie is available for download in the public domain film section of the Internet Archive at archive.org.