For your Halloween consideration…
This classic horror comedy stars Vincent Price as a conniving undertaker who resorts to murder to drum up business. Peter Lorre is his bumbling, soft-hearted assistant, Boris Karloff his senile father-in-law, and Basil Rathbone his hardnosed landlord-turned-victim. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, with a brilliant script by horror great Richard Matheson, this is the sort of film Abbott and Costello might have made had they been into Shakespeare and worked for Hammer Films. Very smart, wonderfully entertaining, and family-friendly; we watch it every year.
You can watch it streaming on Netflix, or rent it on Amazon for $2.99.
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Two interesting footnotes. First, Karloff and Rathbone were originally cast in the opposite roles, but Karloff, despite being the younger of the two, was too frail to play the more athletic part of the landlord. Second, Matheson borrowed Karloff’s flowery funeral oration almost verbatim from his 1955 short story “The Funeral,” so that when he later adapted that on NIGHT GALLERY, he had to write a new speech for the television episode! Tourneur had, of course, recently directed Matheson’s classic TWILIGHT ZONE episode “Night Call.” For further information, see my book RICHARD MATHESON ON SCREEN (http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-4216-4).