SCARED STIFF

Scared Stiff turned out to be a major disappointment for me. I bought this video sometime back and held off watching it until Halloween, since it was a remake of The Ghost Breakers starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard, which was really a great movie.

Through a series of mis-adventures, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis wind up on a boat headed for Cuba and agree to help a damsel in distress, Lizabeth Scott, with a castle she has inherited. Is the castle really haunted or is there some other reason people don't want her to assume possession? Well, you can probably guess the answer to that question.

Produced by Hal Wallis with additional dialogue provided by Ed Simmons and Norman Lear, this film looked like it would be a sure winner. While Dean Martin was good as the smooth swinging lover boy character and Jerry Lewis was probably good as the idiot character, that's where my problem lies. I just don't get Jerry Lewis (maybe I should have been born in France). I assume Lewis' man-child acting must amuse plenty of folks, the humor is just lost on me. Scared Stiff was a long drawn out unfunny film for me with only a few bright spots.
 

Dino sings a couple of tunes, as does Carmen Miranda (in this her final film) and although I really was just in a hurry to get to the end of the film, these musical interludes were better than most of the movie.  In a uncredited part,  Frank Fontaine (Crazy Guggenheim from the Jackie Gleason Show), pops up as, what else, a drunk and this is probably the best comedic scene in the film. However, the very brightest spot in Scared Stiff was a brief cameo by Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, in their few seconds on screen, they out shined Martin and Lewis by a mile.

RIO BRAVO

 

Rio Bravo is Howard Hawks and John Wayne's right wing answer to High Noon (a movie Wayne called "un-American"). John Wayne is a small town sheriff who's holding a big ranch baron's brother in his small jail until the U.S. Marshall comes through town. The only help he has is an ex-deputy who has become a drunk (Dean Martin), a young gunslinger (Ricky Nelson) and a crippled deputy (Walter Brennan).

There are a couple of song performances in Rio Bravo. Dean Martin sings ""My Rifle, My Pony, and Me" with Ricky Nelson joining in on the song. This is followed by Ricky Nelson singing the old folk song "Get Along Home Cindy" with Martin and Walter Brennan accompanying him.

Dean Martin did a pretty good job as Dude in Rio Bravo and considering he was acting with veteran actors John Wayne, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, and Angie Dickinson, I think that says a lot about his acting ability. On the other hand, Ricky Nelson was way out of his league and it really showed. You could tell in many scenes he was really trying (several times he decided acting was running a finger up and down one side of his nose), but his character never rang true and he was rather an ill fit in the film. Something about Nelson made it look like his mother had dressed him up in his best cowboy outfit and sent him straight from the Ozzie and Harriet set to go play with the big boys. Since his acting was about the same as it was on his family's TV show, it doesn't stretch the imagination too much to believe in this scenario.