Three taped ghosts

Another of the movies that I watched because it sounded like it had an interesting premise was the 1936 film Three Live Ghosts. It's the third, and so far last, movie version of a novel that was then turned into a stage play, and I have to admit that it's not hard to see why nobody's thought to make a fourth version of it.

The movie opens up around Armistice Day in 1918. Three soldiers who fought for Britain before getting captured by Germany and becoming POWs are returning home: Gubbins (Charles McNaughton); Spoofy (Claud Allister); and an American who had reasons for signing up with the British before the US entry in the war, Bill Jones (Richard Arlen). However, when the three make it to an army personnel office, all three discover that they've been declared killed in action!

This causes some problems, although not necessarily the ones that you might think of in movies like Too Many Husbands or Enemies: a Love Story. Nobody got remarried after becoming a widow. Instead, they return to London where Gubbins lived with his stepmother (Beryl Mercer) and Bill's girlfriend Ann (Cecilia Parker) live in the same apartment building. As for Spoofy, nobody seems to know much about his past, including Spoofy himself, which might have to do with shell shock and being left a little touched in the head.

The big problem for Gubbins is that his step-mom accepted his death, more so because it meant she'd get a nice allotment check from the government for having sacrificed a child, even if it was a stepchild, to the cause. Spoofy doesn't know where home is, and Bill finds that there's an American detective who's crossed the Atlantic looking for him, as he has some sort of criminal history that caused him to flee and fight for Britain in the first place. The British, unsurprisingly, don't have any issues with extraditing Bill.

At least, they wouldn't if there's no possibility that Bill has legal problems in the UK. And he's about to. Spoofy, having some sort of mental issue, goes off and gets involved with the Brockton jewels, in an era when jewels had names and apparently everybody knew about certain jewels the way people know gossip about celebrities today. Worse is the fact that the Brockton kid gets kidnapped. The police are fairly quick to trace everything to the apartment building where the three men are living. Mrs. Gubbins, meanwhile, is happy to turn Bill over to the police, since there's a reward that could have her financially set for the rest of her life.

Even thought there's apparently a novel underlying Three Live Ghosts, it really feels like a stage play, and one that was dated even for 1936. Perhaps it all seemed fresh and new immediately following the Great War, but by 1936 I don't think it was. And the director doesn't do much to draw the action out, although this was also a decided B movie. Finally, the story ends with what feels like a bit of a deus ex machina, as though the writers didn't know how to resolve it. What they came up requires quite a bit of straining of credulity.

Still, the idea of somebody being declared dead only to be discovered very much alive a substantial amount of time later is always going to be interesting. It's just that Three Live Ghosts doesn't handle it very well.