July 28 – Aug 3 Screwball Comedy: Just imagine, the Great Depression is raging and you’re getting less than a fin a week at the rubber boiling factory, but it only costs two bits to go to the movies all day, so let’s watch some quick-talking dames match wits with some dopey joes!

The third and final installment in the initial series of supernatural comedy films inspired by the novels of Thorne Smith, this follows Topper and Topper Takes a Trip. The strange thing is that it may have Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) and his wife (Billie Burke), but it has a totally different set of ghosts.

Wealthy young heiress Ann Carrington (Carole Landis, One Million B.C.) and her best friend Gail Richards (Joan Blondell) are nearly killed by a masked and black gloved Giallo-style maniac when he shoots out their tire. They have a comical time catching a ride — Blondell’s thigh causes a man to crash a car — before Cosmo and his driver Eddie (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) pick them up and drive them to their destination, the Carrington mansion.

Everything about this place is creepy, so strange that you wonder if Ann and Gail are about to put on diaphonus white gowns and clutch candleabras. There are evil servants, like Lillian (Rafaela Ottiano) and Rama (Trevor Bardette). And the sinister Dr. Jeris (George Zucco), who warns Ann that the father she has never met, Henry Carrington (H. B. Warner), is in poor health. She was raised far away, as her mother had asked in her will, after she and her father’s business partner died in a company mine. Now, her father tells her that tomorrow, on her birthday, she will assume complete control of the family fortune.

Gail makes a fuss about her room being small and takes Ann’s, but who could sleep after a chandelier almost kills them? Somehow, they do go to bed, just in time for that murderer in black to knife Gail, thinking that she’s Ann. But don’t be sad — this is a Topper movie and Gail comes back as a ghost, one who threatens Topper with a scandal if he doesn’t help solve her murder. As for his driver, he claims that he’s going back to working for Jack Benny, because ghosts never showed up there.

Seriously — Gail’s body shows up and then disappears, and I wonder, is this an Edgar Wallace-written Topper? There’s mistaken identity, leather gloved knife-carrying lunatics, family drama, a will — this has it all and by all, I mean it’s totally a Giallo. At least this ends happily, except for the ghosts again scaring Rochester.

Director Roy Del Ruth (The Alligator People) and writers Jonathan Latimer (30+ Perry Mason episodes), Gordon Douglas (who would later direct Them! and In Like Flint) and Paul Gerard Smith put together a fun farce that may not have all the characters of the films, but has the right ones. Blondell fondly recalled the film thirty years later, saying, “It was a hit but has grown on TV viewings because it is public domain. I laugh when I see it. I laugh at Eddie Anderson, Patsy Kelly, Billie Burke, and Rollie Young. It’s a send-up of all those dark house plots.”

You can watch this on YouTube.