Beware Spooks! *** (1939, Joe E Brown, Mary Carlisle, Clarence Kolb) – Classic Movie Review 7386

Director Edward Sedgwick’s pleasant 1939 Columbia Pictures 65-minute black and white comedy Beware Spooks! is a moderately well made, mildly amusing vehicle for Joe E Brown’s knockabout antics as jittery, bumbling cop Roy Gifford, who first fails to make an easy arrest of a bank robber, and then ends up rounding up the crooks at the Coney Island fair amusement park’s haunted house.

Beware Spooks! gets a further lift with Mary Carlisle proving a bright co-star as Betty Lou Winters Gifford and Clarence Kolb amusing as the police commissioner, Lester Lewis.

The comedy is patchy but the best bits are very funny, and the film is decently crafted. The genial Brown is always a pleasure to watch. Also in the cast are Marc Lawrence, Don Beddoe and George J Lewis.

The screenplay by Richard Flournoy, Albert Duffy and Brian Marlow is based on a play by Richard Flournoy.

Mary Carlisle (born Gwendolyn Witter; February 3, 1914 – August 1, 2018).

RIP Boston-born, blue-eyed blonde Mary Carlisle, who died on 1 August 2018, aged 104. She made 65 films in a career that spanned about a dozen years, including Grand Hotel (1932), The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi (1933), College Humor (1933), Double or Nothing (1937), This Side of Heaven (1934), Doctor Rhythm (1938) and Tip-Off Girls (1938). Dead Men Walk (1943) is her last movie.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7386

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