Mr. Skitch

My internet went out for a couple of hours a few nights ago, forcing me to fire up the DVD player which in some ways isn't a bad thing considering the number of DVDs I've got sitting unwatched. This time, it was another film from my Will Rogers box set: Mr. Skitch.

In the town of Flat River, MO, Ira Skitch (Will Rogers) lives together with his wife Maddie (ZaSu Pitts), adult daughter Emily (Rochelle Hudson), and three young kids. Ira has been working as some sort of repairman, but there's a depression on, don't you know, and work has dried up. Also, the bank that Ira put the family's money in has failed, so Ira hasn't been able to pay off the mortgage and the home is about to be foreclosed on. Hardest hit by this is Emily, who had hoped to land a man above her station as husband but who rejects her as soon as he discovers the Skitch family's financial hardship. Some love.

So Ira, several years before The Grapes of Wrath was published, decides that the best thing to do is to pack up the family and head west to California since at the time it was seen as a land of economic opportunity. However, the family takes a rather circuitous route, as they go first to Yellowstone, then the Grand Canyon, and finally an auto-camp in what is supposedly the Lake Tahoe area of Nevada. (I don't remember how much gambling there was going on in Las Vegas in the early 1930s, and in any case it would have been much too hot for an auto-camp.)

This bunch of detours is really an excuse to make Mr. Skitch a bit more of a sketch comedy movie with the various characters Skitch meets while he tries to make enough money to actually get to California. There's a British actress, Flo (Florence Desmond) who at one point does her best Greta Garbo impersonation. Eugene Pallette plays an inebriated gambler in the Nevada segment, and there's also a wealthy retiree traveling across country in a mobile home whom Skitch encounters at Yellowstone. Oh, and Yellowstone is also an excuse for Mrs. Skitch to have an encounter with a couple of bears that is of course played for comic event.

Emily's lack of job prospects back in Missouri that led her to go along for the ride is also a bit of an excuse for her to be in the romantic subplot that dominates a good portion of the movie along with supplying the requisite happy ending. At a pond in Yellowstone that thankfully isn't one of those hot mineral springs that would have killed her instantly, she falls in, and is rescued by Harvey Denby (Charles Starrett before playing the Durango Kid) who is dressed as a West Point cadet because he's going to be heading back to West Point after the summer. Denby has a wealthy uncle, not that he's letting on, and is willing to love Emily even if she is poor. But she doesn't get this until the final reel.

To be honest, Mr. Skitch isn't as good as some of the other Will Rogers movies I've seen, largely because of the series of vignettes structuring. That, and this time even more than other Rogers movies, the Depression forces him to be uncomfortably dishonest in trying to earn that money to get the family to get to California. We understand why he's doing it, but it all still seems scammy.

Mr. Imperium

Another of the movies that I reecorded when Lana Turner got a day in the 2025 edition of Summer Under the Stars was Mr. Imperium. It's a movie that I don't think gets all that much mention when it comes to Turner's filmography. Having seen it, I can understand why.

Turner plays Frederica Brown, an actress who is doing some sort of American-themed stage show at a club in Italy in 1939, which is of course just before World War II kicked off in Europe, and a fact that ought to set off all sorts of alarm bells in terms of anachronisms and the question of how the movie will handle the history of the intervening 12 years. Anyhow, one of the male patrons sees Frederica and falls for her, creating a ruse in which he calls himself Mr. Imperium to get the chance to meet her.

Imperium takes Frederica to the sort of lovely Mediterranean villa that, by the end of the decade, would have been filmed on location in lovely wide-screen in addition to the pretty good color we have here. (IMDb says the California coast around Monterey and Pebble Beach are standing in for Italy, which isn't a bad stand-in.) Imperium played by the much older Ezio Pinza, reveals that his true identity is Alexis, the crown prince of Italy. Alexis is a widower with an unseen 5-year-old son. Alexis knows his duty is to become king, and he's resigned himself to that, although he's not thrilled that this is going to be his son's fate too. And not that Alexis can really marry an actress like Frederica: it would cause a royal scandal.

In any case, Alexis suddenly hears from the prime minister Bernand (Cedric Hardwicke) that the King has taken a sudden turn for the worse and that Alexis is going to have to go to Rome to see the King. Alexis writes a note to Frederica to explain, but Bernand burns the note so that Frederica won't understand why Alexis just up and left her, at least not until she sees the news of the king's death. Frederica has to be smart enough to know what all that means.

Anyhow, a dozen years pass. Frederica, now using the stage name Fredda Barlo, is a successful Hollywood actress with a boyfriend in producer Paul Hunter (Barry Sullivan) who is trying to get her to sign a long-term contract. In Paris, Alexis sees a marquee and lobby card for Fredda's latest movie. He realizes he has to get to America incognito to have another chance to see her again. So he schemes to get in contact with Fredda, who is going to be going to Palm Springs to contemplate her next movie. Fredda is staying at a private resort run by Mrs. Cabot (Marjorie Main) and her shockingly indiscreet niece Gwen (Debbie Reynolds).

Alexis, again registered under the alias Mr. Imperium, tells Fredda about the history of what's been going on in his country since the war. He abdicated following a post-war revolution, and his kid is at a boarding school in England, soon to turn 18. However, the country has been going through revolution for quite some time, with one section of the population tired of the revolution and thinking that the monarchy would be a good way to return stability and a unifying force to the country. There's going to be a plebiscite next week on whether to restore the monarchy, and Alexis plans to lose it so he can stay with Fredda. And then Bernand shows up to reveal a twist....

Mr. Imperium is another of those movies that's decidedly of its time, and is supposed to be inoffensive. If you're not the biggest fan of MGM's musical romances of the era, especially considering that Pinza's music stylings are more operatic, you're probably going to have a problem with this one. For me, the bigger problem was with Debbie Reynolds' scenes. She's just so obnoxious in trying to snoop on her guests. If she hadn't been the proprietress' niece, she would have been fired for cause.

Mr. Imperium is a minor movie, but I can see why some people might like it.

Never Steal Anything Wet

It's time for another of those movies that I recorded from the previous TCM showing, and is now getting another airing on TCM. This time, the movie is Catalina Caper, and the next airing is tomorrow, June 25, at 9:30 AM.

After some cheesy animated opening credits, we get a scene of a guy snooping around a museum late one night, stopping at one of the paintings. Well, technically, it's not a painting; it's a scroll from one or another of the Chinese dynasties, so several hundred years old. The man removes it from its frame, this being the era and the sort of lower-tier museum that doesn't have an alarm on each painting, and is able to get the scroll out of the building without being discovered, more or less.

Cut to the ferry that goes between Southern California and Catalina Island. Bob and Sid are a couple of Harbor Patrol workers seeing that people get on board the ferry safely, before making the trip over to Catalina Island themselves. Among the people on the ferry is the thief from the opening scene, as well as a couple of college guys. Don Pringle (Tommy Kirk) is from Arizona and has apparently never seen the ocean, so he's being brought over to Catlaina by his friend Charlie, who's quite the ladies' man. Another reason Charlie is bringing Don to Catalina is to introduce him to the hot bikini-clad girls who show up on the beaches of Catalina. One last person is an unnamed (until the finale) man played by Robert Donner who provides comic relief but is clearly going to be integral to the plot in some way that is revealed in the finale.

The ferry ride is an excuse to bring in Little Richard to perform a number, on the theory that presumably the teens who were the target audience for a movie like this were still interested in Little Richard even though his heyday had passed several years earlier. And why does he never show up again even though he was on the ferry?

Anyhow, after the ferry makes it to Catalina, the thief makes his way to a yacht owned by Arthur Duval (Del Moore). Arthur commissioned the heist, with the idea that his wife was going to forge a copy of the scroll and sell the forged copy to wealthy Greek collector Lakopoulos. Arthur has a son Tad who is about the same age as Charlie and Don and all the bikini-clad women. He suspects his father is up to no good, but for understandable reasons doesn't want his parents to wind up in prison.

Lakopoulos doesn't plan to pay for the scroll, but steal it. In his attempt to have his henchmen steal it, however, the container in which Duval put it gets thrown overboard, leading to a Lakopoulos' scuba divers trying to find it. The younger set, meanwhile, also scuba dives for pleasure, not knowing that danger lurks beneath the surface. There's also a lot of scenes of those young people doing beach things along with music by a group called the Cascades who had had a hit several years earlier with a song called "Rhythm of the Rain".

Catalina Caper came near the end of the cycle of beach movies, and as far as I can tell was more or less independently produced on the cheap. That shows, as the movie is fairly lousy, with a paper-thin plot that's an excuse to show shots of nubile young women in bikinis. The music is typical for movies of the era: I've seen a whole bunch of movies from the 60s where a character turns on the radio and this instrumental guitar music plays as though this was the popular music of the era. Most of the score is that sort of bland and not very good music. Worst, however, is the acting, which is wooden at best.

I'd guess that the people behind the movie thought they could make a quick buck by cashing in on a trend. They clearly weren't thinking about creating a good movie.

An American Romance

Tomorrow's daytime programming on TCM is a bunch of movies directed by King Vidor. One that I hadn't seen before, but that was on my DVR was An American Romance, which TCM is showing at 8:15 AM. By now, you know the drill, which is that I watched it off the DVR in order to be able to do this write-up in time for tomorrow's showing.

Brian Donlevy plays Stefan Dangosbiblicek, a Czech man in the early 1890s who is emigrating to the US in part because he's got a cousin in the iron-mining part of Minnesota, the Mesabi range on the north shore of Lake Superior. He barely speaks English, and doesn't have enough money per the law on how much an immigrant should have so as not to be a burden for at least some period of time. But one of the men manning the immigration booth has pity on Stefan, who claims to be a hard worker, and sends him on his way to work -- and walk -- his way west to Minnesota.

Amazingly, Stefan makes it all the way out to Minnesota, where he finds cousin Anton (John Qualen), who does indeed still work in the open-pit iron mine, with the real thing being shown on screen here. He is indeed a hard worker, which is going to stand him in good stead later in the movie, but also wants to learn. Thankfully there's a schoolteacher, Anna O'Rourke (Ann Richards), who is willing to help him learn English, and the two fall in love along the way and get married. Anna eventually has five children: a duaghter and four sons named after US presidents.

Stefan, who along the way had his name Americanized to Steve Dangos, keeps working hard and becomes foreman at a steel mill in one of those mid-sized midwest cities. It's enough for him to be able to buy a car, but this being a car from the crank era of starting, it's still not particularly reliable. This causes him to take the car completely apart to figure out how it runs, although even that stands Steve in good stead as he comes up with an idea to start a factory of his own for new ideas in automotive engineering. This even though other companies aren't so certain of the innovations like a steel roof to keep people safer in roll-over accidents. The fact that there's about to be a Depression on doesn't help either.

And, along the way, various other parts of US history are going to intrude on Steve's story. There's World War I, which costs Steve one of his sons. At the end, there's also World War II, which is handled in a rather propagandistic manner. An American Romance was released in 1944, while World War II was still raging. It seems fairly clear that An American Romance included a fair bit into the story designed to further the war effort explicitly, or through fostering social cohesion. Just before World War II is a long sequence about the labor union struggles of the 1930s, with Steve's own son Theodore Roosevelt Dangos (Stephen McNally, still early enough in his career to be credited under his birth name Horace) on the side of the labor union.

Watching An American Romance, I couldn't help but think about some of the other epic movies about the American experience, such as Avalon. An American Romance is certainly well-made, although the story feels like a romanticized (no pun intended) version of the immigrant experience. That, and it also comes across as having to check off a bunch of boxes about what the American Dream of social and economic advancement was about for early 20th century immigrants. An American Romance isn't a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it does feel a bit formulaic.

Love Begins at 20

I've mentioned a lot how I like the Warner Bros. B movies. But even they produced some that are stinkers. One that's a mess because of how much it's trying to do is Love Begins at 20.

Hugh Herbert is the star here, which may be a red flag for some people because I know he can be a bit of an acquired taste. He plays Horace Gillingwater, a man who seems to be surprisingly wealthy considering his working at a broom factory. He can support two adult daughters, Lois (Patricia Ellis) and Alice (Mary Treen), although he has an overbearing wife Evalina (Dorothy Vaughan) as well as an overbearing boss Ramp who wants to cut Horace's pay. Lois wants to get married to Jerry (Warren Hull) who helps run deliveries for the local grocer, but Mom is so overbearing that she hates the guy and has no desire to let her daughter marry a man like this. Indeed, Mom makes Dad's life hell by constantly telling him she should have married some guy named Harold Macauley.

Horace gets tasked with going to the next town over to retrieve some bonds that the boss has at the bank in that town: couldn't the boss go himself? And wouldn't the boss have to do so to fetch the bonds? But it's a plot device for Horace to have the bonds in his hands when a couple of bank robbers come in and rob the joint, taking the bonds as well as a bunch of cash, which is an obvious problem, even though there's not really anything that's Horace's fault.

And then Mom decides to go out to the movies with Alice. This gives Jerry the chance to show up and hopefully convince Dad to give his permission for him and Lois to elope. Also coming over is Horace's lodge friend Jacob Buckley (Hobart Cavanaugh). Buckley also has some alcohol with him. Horace would never drink in the presence of his wife, because she's so controlling that she'd have an absolute fit. Indeed, she did the last time Horace had too much to drink, which was before Prohibition.

Jacob convinces Horace to go to the lodge, and a bunch of plot points start to come together. The bank robbers have fled here not knowing that one of the witnesses to the robbery lives here. Horace's boss shows up at the lodge and Horace, now drunk, picks a fight with his boss. And then the robbers plant the bonds on Horace so they won't be caught red-handed when the cops show up. But they go looking for Horace at his home.

Love Begins at 20 is based on a play that apparently starred Bette Davis before she went off to Hollywood. The material is something that probably worked better on the stage where everybody is coming and going on the same set. Trying to open it up, ironically, didn't really work. Then again, I'd expect that the play would have run longer than an hour, so everything wasn't so rushed.

Ultimately, I didn't particularly care for Love Begins at 20, but I can see why some people might find it interesting.

The Story of Esther Costello

Another actor who has several movies that wound up on my DVR without being part of any particular tribute is Italian actor Rossano Brazzi. This time, the movie that features him is The Story of Esther Costello.

As you might guess, Brazzi does not in fact play Esther Costello. Nor does the female lead, Joan Crawford, although we get to see Crawford quite a bit before we get to see Brazzi. We first get to see Esther herself. In a prologue scene, it's 1948 Ireland in one of those dirt-poor villages, and Esther is playing with a couple of boys. Esther has found a cellar where a cache of explosives from either the war of independence from Britain or perhaps the civil war that followed remains hidden a quarter century on. The kids must be too young to read, or else they'd know that these are dangerous explosives and not toys to be played with. But they're stupid, and one of them pulls the pin on one of the grenades. In the resulting explosion, Esther's mother is killed as, presumably, are the two boys.

Fast forward to 1953. Margaret Landi (Joan Crawford) is a childless American woman who is apparently rich enough to travel to the village where she grew up, and even buy chocolates for the village children. The parish priest, Fr. Devlin (Denis O'Dea), informs her there's one more child, which is how Margaret gets introduced to Esther (Heather Sears). In the accident, Esther became deaf-blind, and is living in squalor with an alcoholic granny. Margaret is horrified, and decides that she's willing to become the child's guardian and take her over to England and then the US, where there are schools that teach the deaf-blind how to use their sense of touch to learn Braille as well as finger-spell and things like that.

It's a lot of work, but Esther is a good student and eventually reaches the point where Margaret it willing to bring her to a school assembly at a school for children with all five senses for a talk about overcoming hardships. One of the girls is overcome by emotion, and it's there that the idea is born, in part with help from newspaper reporter Harry Grant (Lee Patterson) who has already met Esther. Esther's could be an inspiring story, and that inspiration could be used to raise money for other deaf-blind people. Those schools need quite a bit of money, after all.

Margaret decides it's a good idea, and has good intentions, so she takes Esther around and parades her to large audiences as the donations start pouring in. And then Margaret sees a check she'd rather not see: it's signed by one Carlo Landi (that's Rossano Brazzi). Carlo is Margaret's estranged husband, the sort of man who cheated on Margaret and likely cheated his clients in whatever work he did, to the point that for the first half of the movie I was expecting Margaret's husband to be in prison.

Carlo works his way back into Margaret's life, although it's also a bit of a ruse. Carlo sees all that money coming in, and figures it's a good way for all of them to live a life with at least some luxury in it. Or, at least, a good way for Carlo. He has the idea of bringing Esther back to Europe and going on an extended engagement tour, lying as well about how much money is coming in so that he can skim some of it off. You'd think Margaret might have figured this out by now.

She eventually does figure it out, as does Harry, who wants to rescue Esther from all this because he thinks he's in love with her. But there's the question of what it would do to Esther if she found out that people around her whom she trusted are basically scamming her. And if that's not enough, the story takes a plot twist just in time for the finale....

The main idea of The Story of Esther Costello dealing with charities scamming gullible people, isn't a bad one. And for the most part The Story of Esther Costello really isn't a bad movie. But it does have some plot holes that do bring it down a peg or two. One is the plot's requiring that Margaret be a bit too dim to figure out that her husband just wants to scam people again. She's incredibly quick to bring him back into her life. And really would a charity of that size be run by only one or two people, especially someone like Margaret who had no experience doing such things?

Still, overall, The Story of Esther Costello is definitely one that's worth watching.

Your annual Father's Day reminder

Tomorrow is the third Sunday in June, which means that in the US and a lot of other countries it's Father's Day. Since TCM is of course an American channel, it's no surprise that their programming aligns with the US scheduling of the observance. Apparently, a fair number of Catholic countries use March 19, the feast day of St. Joseph, to mark the occasion since as the husband of Mary he's the Catholic patron saint of fathers.

In any case, there's a relatively limited set of Father's Day movies TCM can run, and once again the day's lineup is interrupted by the second airing of Noir Alley since there aren't all that many noir films with fatherhood as a them. Moms at least get Mildred Pierce. Tomorrow's lineup is:

6:00 AM Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
8:00 AM East of Eden
10:00 AM The Man I Love (Noir Alley re-air)
Noon Love Story (OK, I guess there's a complicated father-son relationship here)
1:45 PM Judge Hardy and Son (There are actually a bunch of Hardy Family movies they could have picked)
3:30 PM The Courtship of Eddie's Father
5:45 PM Life With Father
8:00 PM Father of the Bride (1950; the Spencer Tracy version)
9:45 PM To Kill a Mockingbird

Now, I put the whole Father's Day schedule down here because I was curious to see how many of the movies are repeats of last year, seeing how I have TCM schedules going back quite a few years. So, let's go back in time to those thrilling days of 2025 and see what TCM was doing:

6:15 AM The Entertainer (another difficult father-children relationship)
8:00 AM Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (ooh, there's the first repeat)
10:00 AM Crack-Up (another Noir Alley re-air)
Noon Midnight (I'm assuming this was part of some noon on Sunday programming feature the way we get the Musical Matinee at noon on Saturday)
1:45 PM Judge Hardy and Son (a repeat, and at the same time!)
3:30 PM The Courtship of Eddie's Father (LOL)
5:45 PM East of Eden (better at dinner; I remember when TCM's morning intro was "Look for the Silver Lining", which doesn't quite go with a movie like East of Eden)
8:00 PM Father of the Bride (and once again, the Spencer Tracy version)
9:45 PM Life With Father (you knew it was coming)
Midnight The Kid (unlike this year, Silent Sunday Nights included a movie with a father-son relationshp

So, no surprise at how much there was in common. But if anybody at TCM is reading this: pick a different Hardy Family movie next year.

Kissing Time

Back in 2013, I briefly mentioned a night of Busby Berkeley movies and the shorts that aired in between. One that got about a line was Kissing Time, which got no further mention because I had never seen it before. Eventually, it got another TCM showing as part of the Saturday matinee block and, not remembering having brought it up 13 years ago, I recorded it.

Jane Froman is the female lead here, and as I mentioned back in 2013 she's famous for having survived a plane crash in 1943 that was the subject of the biopic With a Song in My Heart starring Susan Hayward as Froman. She plays Miss Sullivan, traveling in an unnamed Latin American country with her father and having met some guy named Ferdie on what is the local festival day, leading the locals to do a song and dance number.

Showing up is an army lieutenant Segovia (Georges Metaxa) togethr with "El Toro" (Don Zelaya), who is the dictator of the country. They're driving a car which was manufactured by the Sullivan company, of which Dad is an executive. When the car breaks down, they think Mr. Sullivan can fix it, not realizing he's only an executive and not a mechanic. But it's an excuse to detain the Sullivans to try to get Dad to service the car.

Lt. Segovia meets Miss Sullivan and immediately falls in love with her as they sing a couple of songs to each other. And then El Toro shows up and sees Segovia singing, and is ticked because he's got a thing for Miss Sullivan and, as dictator, naturally believes that what he says goes so he should be the one to wind up with Miss Sullivan. Screw what she thinks. In any case, El Toro plan to have Lt. Segovia executed.

What you think of Kissing Time is going to depend largely on what you think of the type of music that is being performed in it. The short is from 1933, so the musical stylings are going to be extremely dated to a lot of people. And, I have to admit, this isn't my favorite type of arrangement. That having been said, the stars here do have talent, and for people who like to see the sort of stuff that audiences of the day considered entertaining above and beyond the prestige movies, Kissing Time is a good example.

The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss

One of those movies that fell into the public domain such that I firstl learned about it by seeing it show up as a DVD for purchase on sites specialising in public domain stuff is The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss. (It was released in the US under the title The Amazing Adventure.) Some time back I found that it had made its way to one of the FAST platforms, so I decided I'd finally give it a try.

Cary Grant plays Ernest Bliss, one of those men who seems to have inherited a bunch of money and who is able to live off that wealth as a result, not that he'd have known World War II would be coming along to destroy the wealth and way of life of people like him. In any case Bliss, despite having a wonderful apartment, finds that he's just not satisfied with life, something that's understandable considering he doesn't have any sense of purpose. After talking to his friend Lord Honiton, Bliss goes to see doctor to the wealthy Sir James Alroyd, who coes up with the wacky diagnosis that Ernest is suffering from affluence, which sounds like something a scammer would say to get wealthy people to part with their money.

Ernest, for his part, doesn't like Alroyd's suggestion, so tells him that he could make it on his own without that wealth. To that end, he makes a wager with Sir James, to the tune of £50,000. Bliss says he can survive for a year being staked to a measly £5, not using any of his wealth in any way that might benefit him personally. If he fails the bet, Alroyd's clinic will get the £50,000.

Ernest has no difficulty getting an attic room to let, but getting a good job that will allow him to pay the rent and survive is rather more difficult. Eventually, he gets work as a door-to-door salesman selling kitchen stoves, but the work is based on commission and Bliss doesn't seem able to make any sales. That is, until he comes up with a brilliant idea for a promotion, but one that's going to cost £500. He can use his own money for it, but that would cause him to lose the bet. Except that since the wager called for him not to use the money for his own benefit, he figures if he quits the job immediately after the promotion works, it can't be seen as using the money for his own benefit. Also working for the company, as the boss' secretary, is Frances Clayton (Mary Brian). She and Ernest become friends, and she too leaves the company because her boss is trying to pressure her into marrying him.

Bliss gets a job as a chauffeur for the 1930s British equivalent of a limousine service, and finds that one of the assignments he gets is actually to his own old apartment that he's left his valet in charge of. His valet rather stupidly decided to wager a bunch of money on dog racing, such that he's been blackmailed into letting the people who lent him the money live in Bliss' apartment. They've been thinking of forging Bliss' signature to get money out of his bank accounts, so when they see a chauffer who looks like Bliss they see a great chance for their scheme to work.

Bliss is able to foil this, but we're still not at the one year mark, and the requisite happy ending that a movie like this is bound to have. How we get there, you're going to have to watch for yourself.

The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss was originally released in Britain in 1936 with a running time of about 80 minutes. But when it was released in the US, it was edited down to about 62 minutes. It's that edit that TubiTV has, along with all of the public domain sites. (Supposedly the BFI has a 77-minute version.) The result of getting and edit but by almost a quarter is that it really does feel like something is missing from the movie.

In any case, Cary Grant does a professional job on a movie that would be more or less a programmer. It's not great by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also certainly not bad, and would have fit the bill of entertaining audiences of the day while keeping Cary Grant in the spotlight with another film.

Fun if not macabre

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR for a while is the early William Castle horror effort Macabre. This is the one that had Castle show up to the premiere in a coffin and offer insurance policies to anyone against dying of fright during the movie. Well, the movie isn't exactly that frightening, but it's fun for what it is.

William Prince stars as Rodney Barrett, a doctor in a small California town who doesn't have a particularly good life. Some years back his wife Alice died in childbirth (the child, a daughter named Marge, survived), and the gossip around town has been that the not-so-good doctor probably could have done something to prevent it rather than getting good and drunk. Alice was the daughter of the town's banker, Jode Wetherby (Philip Tonge), but the child lives with the doctor who has a nanny Miss Kushins (Ellen Corby). About the one other person who supports the doctor is his assistant Polly (Jacqueline Scott).

Well, there is one other person, Sylvia Stevenson (Susan Morrow), whom Dr. Barrett is planning to marry and make her Marge's stepmother. Again, however, the gossip around town is that Barrett was having an affair with Sylvia before Alice died, which might explain as well why the town doesn't much care for him. And if that's not bad enough, things are about to get a whole lot worse for Dr. Barrett.

Barrett returns home where in theory Miss Kushins is supposed to be looking after Marge. But Marge isn't there. And then the phone rings, and Polly answers it. She hears a strange voice telling her not only that Marge has been kidnapped, but that the caller has already held a funeral for Marge! That might also fit with the fact that the local undertaker Quigley has called the police chief Tyloe (Jim Backus, decidedly playing against type here) to report that a child-sized coffin has been stolen from his funeral parlor!

Now, since the call says a funeral has already been held, Dr. Barrett suggests that she must have been buried at the cemetery, leading him and Polly to head off there. He also tells Kushins not to say anything to Jode, since Jode has a notoriously bad heart and the information might trigger a heart attack. Naturally, the first thing Kushins does when she's alone is go right over to the Wetherby place. Add in a blind sister-in-law who carries on wanton relationships with various men in the town, and it all leads up to a climax in the cemetery where everything is explained to some level of viewer satisfaction.

William Castle was obviously a good promoter, as Macabre was a commercial success. That having been said, being such a low budget movie it's not exactly good. There's more smoke than fire here, with mostly subpar acting. There's also a scene in the climax at the cemetery that made me think of Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. William Castle certainly had ideas, even if he couldn't always translate them into truly good movies.

Still, Macabre is thoroughly entertaining because of how off it is, and how frankly silly the payoff is once we get to it, which is thankfully not that long since the movie only runs 71 minutes. It's definitely worth your time.