For the month of March, we decided to spend some time with the supernatural and enjoy some ghost stories. Join us for MACABRE MARCH!
RODNEY BOWCOCK: Nick Desborough (Warner Baxter) is happily married celebrating his fifth anniversary to wife, Ellen (Andrea Leeds). While they’re celebrating, Nick gets a telegram requesting him to attend an important business meeting. Except the telegram was sent under false pretenses. We learn that Nick has been enjoying extracurricular activities with Linda Reynolds (Lynn Bari) the wife of his business partner, and though he’s tried to break it off, she’s not taking the news too well. As they get into a scuffle, Linda shoots and kills Nick. As a ghost, Nick cannot transcend past the earth until he helps to bring his real killer to justice.
SAMANTHA GLASSER: The movie opens with Nick and his wife climbing a mountain on their second honeymoon. Fifty tons of ice was shaved to give realism to this scene, and it was slippery enough to require two days of shooting and resulted in Baxter having a dislocated finger and a sprained back. I don’t know why, but my first thoughts were of the movie 45 Years where a woman discovers her husband was accused of his girlfriend’s murder years before they met. The woman in that film died falling off a mountain. This movie doesn’t play out that way, but knowing it is about a death made me on edge wondering how it was going to happen.
RB: Well, in your defense, if you had read the Wikipedia entry before you watched the film, you’d have thought that something was going to happen on the mountain besides Nick getting a telegram. Seems to me that whoever wrote the entry didn’t watch the movie before they wrote the plot description.
SG: Motion Picture magazine complained, “His involvement with the other woman is not sufficiently explained,” and I would agree that more elaboration of their past would have enhanced the drama. Why did he have an affair with his best friend’s wife if his relationship with his own wife was so strong?
RB: There’s a lot in this movie that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It seems to me that Fox was confident that the fantastic special effects would make up for the obvious and numerous plot holes. The two-star review offered by Leonard Maltin accurately describes this film as a “strange little fantasy… a deadly serious mixture of half-baked philosophy and heavy-handed special effects”. What’s peculiar is that ads at the time of release touted Earthbound as a blend of suspense, romance and humor. I’m at a loss to remember ANYTHING in this movie that was funny.
SG: Maybe Charley Grapewin's character was meant to bring levity. I found him to be perplexing, although a welcome personality. He is the only person who can see Baxter when he is a ghost, but it is never explained why. And if he knows Baxter can’t interfere with the court case, why doesn’t he intercede on his behalf to keep an innocent man from being convicted?
RB: I was and remain confused about the Grapewin character as well. Is he perhaps an angel sent to guide Nick on his path? And if so, why isn’t he represented in the same ghostly manner as Nick? I don’t know.
SG: No, he is a living man with a gift to be able to see ghosts. Don't most mediums use their ability to reach out to living loved ones?
Goldwyn studios released this story by Basil King in 1920 starring Wyndham Standing and Naomi Childers. Fox purchased the rights in 1935 for Baxter and Myrna Loy, but the success of Hal Roach’s Topper made them put it back on the shelf.
RB: A.E. Hancock of the Columbia Theatre in Columbia City, Indiana still noticed the similarities. They referred to the movie as “a no-good imitation of Roach’s Topper pictures. He knows how to make them, and Fox does not.”
The 1920 version was still remembered as well. E.M. Freiburger of the Paramount Theatre in Dewey, OK noted that the remake was “a dud which failed to please the few who attended. Was a good picture in the silent days, but Fox sure messed it up."
SG: Before filming began on Earthbound, Baxter found out that Twentieth Century Fox would not be renewing his contract. He went into a depression and worked freelance for a few years before getting picked up by Columbia to do the Crime Doctor series.
RB: There has been some supposition that this film assignment was a way of punishing Baxter but considering that the film (even though produced through the Fox B unit) was marketed as an A picture, I don’t know that there is a lot of stock in that theory.
SG: In order to shoot the ghost sequences, special effects technician Rolla Flora devised a prism that cameraman Lucien Andriot attached to the front of the camera. One side was coated in mercury to give a wavy image. Baxter was 20-30 feet away from the other actors, but the prism captured the scenes so that he was right next to them.
Baxter remembered, “I can’t see him and he can’t see me. In order to appear to be looking at Grapewin, I have to look in the opposite direction, and he has to do the same when he’s supposed to be looking at me.”
RB: Lynn Bari remembered things a little differently. In her (excellent) biography Foxy Lady she recalls: “We weren’t told exactly what was going on as we filmed on this tremendous soundstage with mirrors. My scenes with Warner would be filmed without him. A script guy would be feeding his lines to me. Warner would be off on another set doing the same thing. Then they put the two shots together. I enjoyed Earthbound but, evidently, it didn’t catch on at all.”
SG: I really liked both leading ladies in this film. Bari was subtly unhinged, and Leeds was beautifully emotional without becoming pathetic.
Something I didn’t notice, but Silver Screen magazine noted in their May 1940 issue, is that the women carry gas masks cleverly disguised by fabric to match their clothes including velvet, rose wool, and plaid wool.
RB: I didn’t notice that either. Apparently, screenplay writer John Howard Lawson wanted the film to take place during World War One and had intended on the gas masks playing more of a role in the film. Darryl Zanuck nixed the idea.
SG: The Movies… and the People Who Make Them wrote, “Director Irving Pichel found himself a bit awed perhaps by his astral material, and his hand in the proceedings is consequently unsure. The cast is superior to both script and direction but cannot transcend their limitations entirely.”
In spite of the negative reviews in the press, I found the movie to be entertaining and fun to watch. I didn't notice most of the flaws until I started digging deeper to write about Earthbound for the blog. Three stars.
RB: The parts are greater than the whole this time. It’s a capably directed, well-acted film that never seems to know what kind of movie it’s supposed to be or what it wants to do. I’ll also go with three stars, but just barely.
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