Larry Elliot (Jack Haley), first-rate chess enthusiast but fourth-rate newspaper reporter, is off to Grape City where the Grape City Winery will crown Miss Muscat. In a lovesick mistake, he buys a ticket to Grape Center where perky antique storeowner Sally Warren (Ann Savage) is headed to make a mysterious purchase. It only takes an instant to see that Elliot is naive, innocent, foolish and as dense as a pound of lard. Think of Haley here as unpleasantly like a dim second banana to Harry Langdon.
We wind up staying at the Grape Center Inn and Winery where an extremely valuable chess set has been hidden. This tired, tired mystery comedy features the inn's owners, the elderly, eccentric and competitive Walbeck brothers; the elderly and severe desk manager; the pain- in-the-rear child prodigy who thinks he knows all about fear stimuli; the glowering keeper of the prodigy; the not elderly at all Veda Ann Borg; the suspicious "Professor;" and a tough escaped murderer who just might be the owner of the chess set, There's creeping about at night, hidden passages, a turning door, a toupee, wine vats and a car horn. Jack Haley said once that if it weren't for the performance he gave as the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz, he'd probably be forgotten. Sadly, it's true.
Scared Stiff tries for laughs and frights. If it doesn't succeed at least we've only wasted 65 minutes. For those who can remember two-movie matinees for 25 cents, where the audience didn't evaluate the laughs, just enjoyed them, it's difficult to come down hard on something like this. There's no harm intended and no harm caused.
In a brief opening scene an actor named Edward Earle plays, unbilled, Larry Elliot's impatient uncle. We see him once. Earle was born in 1882, had a reasonably successful career as a lead in the early silent movies but slipped to second leads by the start of the talkies. From there he faded precipitously. By the end of the Thirties he was doing unbilled bits, and stayed there through television until he finally called it a day in 1960. As an old man, Earle was asked by Ben Bagley to take part in Bagley's Revisited series...LPs (and then CDs) of little known songs Bagley discovered from some of the very best theater song writers. And it so it came about that Edward Earle sings several Cole Porter songs on Ben Bagley's Cole Porter Revisited Volume 2. He's funny, a bit lascivious when called for and knows exactly what he's doing to put across a Porter lyric. He's just grand. He's also memorable doing "Dainty Quainty Me," cut from The Seven Lively Arts because Bert Lahr refused to sing "enema' (which Porter rhymed with "cinema"}. In Bagley's Noel Coward Revisited, Earle sings three songs, including the unmistakably left-handed and sophisticated "Green Carnations," a witty song all can enjoy, especially if you're a young, languid man about town. Earle died, full of years, in 1972 at the California Motion Picture Country Home. He was 90.
We wind up staying at the Grape Center Inn and Winery where an extremely valuable chess set has been hidden. This tired, tired mystery comedy features the inn's owners, the elderly, eccentric and competitive Walbeck brothers; the elderly and severe desk manager; the pain- in-the-rear child prodigy who thinks he knows all about fear stimuli; the glowering keeper of the prodigy; the not elderly at all Veda Ann Borg; the suspicious "Professor;" and a tough escaped murderer who just might be the owner of the chess set, There's creeping about at night, hidden passages, a turning door, a toupee, wine vats and a car horn. Jack Haley said once that if it weren't for the performance he gave as the Tin Woodman in The Wizard of Oz, he'd probably be forgotten. Sadly, it's true.
Scared Stiff tries for laughs and frights. If it doesn't succeed at least we've only wasted 65 minutes. For those who can remember two-movie matinees for 25 cents, where the audience didn't evaluate the laughs, just enjoyed them, it's difficult to come down hard on something like this. There's no harm intended and no harm caused.
In a brief opening scene an actor named Edward Earle plays, unbilled, Larry Elliot's impatient uncle. We see him once. Earle was born in 1882, had a reasonably successful career as a lead in the early silent movies but slipped to second leads by the start of the talkies. From there he faded precipitously. By the end of the Thirties he was doing unbilled bits, and stayed there through television until he finally called it a day in 1960. As an old man, Earle was asked by Ben Bagley to take part in Bagley's Revisited series...LPs (and then CDs) of little known songs Bagley discovered from some of the very best theater song writers. And it so it came about that Edward Earle sings several Cole Porter songs on Ben Bagley's Cole Porter Revisited Volume 2. He's funny, a bit lascivious when called for and knows exactly what he's doing to put across a Porter lyric. He's just grand. He's also memorable doing "Dainty Quainty Me," cut from The Seven Lively Arts because Bert Lahr refused to sing "enema' (which Porter rhymed with "cinema"}. In Bagley's Noel Coward Revisited, Earle sings three songs, including the unmistakably left-handed and sophisticated "Green Carnations," a witty song all can enjoy, especially if you're a young, languid man about town. Earle died, full of years, in 1972 at the California Motion Picture Country Home. He was 90.