Cinema Revisited: Scared to Death (1947)

Directed by Christy Cabanne. Cast: Bela Lugosi, George Zucco, Molly Lamont, Nat Pendleton, Joyce Compton, Douglas Fowley, Stanley Andrews, Angelo Rossito, Roland Varno, Gladys Blake, Stanley Price. Released February 1, 1947. Running time 68 minutes.

"Scared to Death" is a low budget horror film that has the significance of being the only color film in which Bela Lugosi stars (he does have a small role in the 1930 color film "Vienesse Nights"). It also features a cast of happily familiar supporting actors, with creepy George Zucco (replacing Lionel Atwill who was dying and could not complete the film).

This film is also novel as being narrated by a corpse, attempting to piece together events to figure out how she ended up dead. I want to believe that this inspired Billy Wilder to do the same thing in "Sunset Boulevard" a few years later.

While it is a low budget throwaway with perfunctory scares that elicit little reaction from the viewer, "Scared to Death" is offbeat enough to be entertaining in spite of its flaws. Actors like Lugosi and Zucco can do these roles with little effort and still be effective, especially when accompanied by stock background music welling up at just the right time, punctuating their scenes. Nat Pendelton had a long career playing everything from terrorizing hit men to bumbling cops. In this movie he is playing the latter, offering a lightness to the creepy proceedings. He is delightful as usual.

Molly Lamont is the standout here. She had spent her career playing supporting roles as socialites of every ilk, and in this quickie production with a threadbare budget she gets to ham it up as the corpse who narrates her final days, and acts the role with jittery brilliance. She started out in B movies in England, and by the time she made "Scared to Death," she was concluding her career. She retired from films in 1951, but lived another 50 years.

With Joyce Compton as a ditzy blonde and Douglas Fowley as a wisecracking reporter, all of the stereotypes are carefully placed amidst death masks, images in windows, and other spooky gags. The subject is literally "scared to death" -- a homicide that cannot be prosecuted.

Reports from the time when "Scared to Death" was in theaters indicate that post-war audiences enjoyed the film, stating that it held the audience with its eerie mood. In fact, in one article a Canadian paper contacted Lugosi about his role, for which he gave his reason why he was effective: "You've got to feel a deep conviction that you are actually about to murder your victim," he explained.

"Scared to Death" has long been in the public domain and is easily accessible on video and for streaming.