Director – Gordon Douglas, Screenplay – Lawrence Kimble, Adaptation – Robert E. Kent, Story – Robert Faber & Charles Newman, Producer – Ben Stoloff, Photography (b&w) – Jack McKenzie, Music – Roy Webb, Art Direction – Albert S. D’Agostino & Walter E. Keller. Production Company – RKO Radio Pictures.
Cast
Wally Brown (Jerry Miles), Alan Carney (Mike Strager), Bela Lugosi (Professor Paul Renault), Anne Jeffreys (Jean La Danse), Sheldon Leonard (Ace Miller), Darby Jones (Kalaga), Joseph Vitale (Joseph), Frank Jenks (Gus), Russell Hopton (Benny), Ian Wolfe (Professor Hopkins), Louis Jean Heydt (Douglas Walker)
Plot
The former mobster Ace Miller is about to open a club on Broadway called the Zombie Hut. He has promised a real zombie for the opening but this is ridiculed on air by popular radio presenter Douglas Walker. Ace’s two press agents Jerry Miles and Mike Strager are tasked with producing a real zombie. After bumbling about, Ace ships them off to the Caribbean island of San Sebastian with orders to return with a zombie for the opening. Joined by Jean La Danse, a singer they meet in a bar, Mike and Jerry set out to find a zombie. They stumble into the home of Professor Paul Renault, a scientist who is determined to perfect an artificial means of creating a zombie. He welcomes them as guests with the real intention to use Mike and Jerry as subjects to test his new batch of zombie serum
Zombies on Broadway was an oddity that emerged from the 1940s era of Horror Comedy. It was made not long after the Bob Hope-starring The Cat and the Canary (1939), which offered a comedy take on the spooky Old Dark House thrills of the previous decade – indeed, there are a number of similarities between Zombies on Broadway and Bob Hope’s follow-up The Ghost Breakers (1940).
Zombies on Broadway is also construed as a parody of RKO’s earlier Val Lewton production I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and casts Darby Jones, the tall, strikingly angular 6’2” African-American actor from that film as another zombie stalking through the fields. Into the mix is thrown Bela Lugosi as a Mad Scientist, the sort of role that was fairly much Lugosi’s bread and butter throughout the 1940s.
Wally Brown and Alan Carney strike up a comic pairing that makes one think of a poor man’s Abbott and Costello. The film floats around assorted comedy routines – shenanigans in the professor’s office with a stuffed ape and mummies falling into laps and the like. There is an extended sequence running around the jungle with Darby Jones’s zombie coming up behind people. It has a certain low-engagement amiability. It’s not awful; on the other hand, it’s not a side-splitting laugh riot.
(l to r front) The two press agents Wally Brown and Alan Carney and mad scientist Bela Lugosi
On the negative side, the film’s racial portrayals when it comes to the African-Americans are not good. Those we see during the American scenes are all simple-minded, fearful and eye-rolling, while speaking in a high register. Although a number of them having speaking parts, none of them are credited – indeed, the only one who is credited throughout is Darby Jones who has the unspeaking role of the zombie Kalaga.
Director Gordon Douglas (1907-93) began working for Hal Roach Studios and made a great many Westerns during the 1940s. He made a number of other genre films including Dick Tracy vs Cueball (1946); the classic giant atomic monster film Them! (1954); the Jerry Lewis space mission comedy Way … Way Out (1966); the spy film In Like Flint (1967); and the Missing Link film Skullduggery (1970).
