The Boogie Man Will Get You ***½ (1942, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Maxie Rosenbloom, Larry Parks) – Classic Movie Review 5642

‘From HORROR To HOWLS… FROM MAYHEM TO MERRIMENT!’ ‘IT’S A CHILLER-DILLER OF A MAYHEM-AND-MERRIMENT SHOW!’

Director Lew Landers’s 1944 comedy horror movie The Boogie Man Will Get You stars Boris Karloff as nutty Professor Nathaniel Billings and Peter Lorre as quack Doctor Lorencz.

Both stars have a great time with an enthusiastic send-up of the terror films they made on the subject of mad doctors carving up bodies to create a race of supermen (but it is OK this time, it is to help the World War Two war effort!).

Karloff plays a madman experimenting on travelling salesmen to try to a future master-race in the cellar of an 18th-century New England inn house, which nice, naïve young divorcee Winnie Slade (played by Miss Jeff Donnell) decides to buy from him, rather recklessly agreeing to allow him to stay on with his daffy housekeeper Amelia Jones (Maude Eburne) and hired hand Ebenezer (George McKay).

At first Winnie is unaware of the nature of Billings’s experiments in his basement laboratory, trying to use electricity to create a race of superhumans to help the war effort. But, on finding the salesmen’s bodies in her basement, she rushes to doctor/ town sheriff Professor Lorencz (Lorre), who seems strangely disinclined to help her. Larry Parks also stars as Winnie’s frantic ex-husband, Bill Layden, who is too late to stop the sale and then decides to stay on at the inn for a few days.

Director Landers keeps this rather splendid little black-comedy horror film short, sassy, sharp and, above all, fast moving.

Also in the cast are Maxie Rosenbloom as Maxie the Powder Puff Salesman, Maude Eburne, Don Beddoe, Frank Puglia, George McKay, Eddie Laughton, Frank Sully and James Morton.

The Boogie Man Will Get You is directed by Lew Landers, runs 67 minutes, is made and released by Columbia Pictures, is written by Edwin Blum, from a story by Hal Fimberg and Robert B Hunt, adapted by Paul Gangelin, is shot in black and white by Henry Freulich, is produced by Colbert Clark, and is scored by Morris W Stoloff.

The Boogie Man Will Get You was released on 22 October 1942.

In 1952, it was released again as a support feature with the Western film Flaming Feather is some cinemas.

It is Karloff’s final film under his contract with Columbia Pictures, made during his success in the 1941 Broadway theatre production of Arsenic and Old Lace, with filming done while the play was on summer break in 1942. There are many similarities between the film and the play, including the dead bodies in the basement and all the eccentric characters, enough possibly to be called ‘a quickie ripoff’. Karloff also appeared three TV adaptations of Arsenic and Old Lace, while Lorre co-stars in the 1944 film version Arsenic and Old Lace.

Karloff plays the part of a mad scientist as he had done times previously in several films he made for Columbia: The Man They Could Not Hang (1939), Before I Hang (1940), The Man With Nine Lives (1940), and The Devil Commands (1941).

Edwin Blum, who wrote the screenplay in just four weeks, said the aim was to create a ‘goose pimple’ film, though he ‘was incapable of writing a straight horror film’.

Building a clear live-sized transparent unclothed model plastic figure of a woman ‘with lights denoting various nerve-centres’ had to be abandoned after the Production Code Administration raised issues over the ‘no nudity in fact or in silhouette’ rule of the Motion Picture Production Code.

Jeff Donnell accidentally calls Peter Lorre ‘Professor Lorre’ rather than ‘Professor Lorencz’ at one point.

Studio publicity hilariously backfired when Columbia devised a campaign to promote the film by getting critics to compile a list of the ten best screen villains, presuming Karloff and Lorre would be high on the list. However, the studio quickly abandoned the idea on finding top three villains were all Disney characters: the witch from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the wolf from Three Little Pigs, and the cat from Pinocchio.

The cast are Boris Karloff as Professor Nathaniel Billings, Peter Lorre as Doctor Arthur Lorencz, Max Rosenbloom as Maxie the Powder Puff Salesman, Larry Parks as Bill Layden, Miss Jeff Donnell as Winnie Slade, Maude Eburne as housekeeper Amelia Jones, Don Beddoe as J Gilbert Brampton, Frank Puglia as an intruder known as Jo-Jo, George McKay as hired hand Ebenezer, Eddie Laughton as travelling salesman Johnson, Frank Sully and James Morton.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5642

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