Classic Horrors Club

Insurance salesman Albert L. Tuttle (Jack Haley) crashes the reading of a millionaire Cyrus J. Rutherford’s will because he’s had an appointment with him for a month and is not aware that he died. Conniving family members confuse him for the private detective hired to watch the body, and antics ensue. 

Why do they need someone to watch a dead body? Well, the will states that Cyrus wants to be interred in a glass-domed vault in the observatory on top of his estate so he can see the stars throughout eternity. If he’s buried underground, the terms of the will reverse and those who were receiving the greatest inheritance will receive the least, and vice versa.

Those who think they’re at the bottom of the totem pole might want to take the body so they end up at the top. The catch is, Cyrus didn’t like any of them!

• His sister, Estelle Hopkins (Fay Helm) married a nincompoop, Kenneth (Lucien Littlefield.)
• He despised his niece’s, Carol Dunlap (Jean Parker), father.
• He didn’t mind his Nephew, Henry Rutherford (Douglas Fowley), but his wife, Mona (Dorothy Granger) wears too much makeup. 
• He’s never met his niece, Margaret Hopkins (Maxine Fife.)

Cyrus’s attorney, Morton Gellman (Bernard Newell), doesn’t read much about Cyrus’s nephew, Jim Davis (Lyle Talbot), making him the assumed inheritor of the largest part of the fortune. However, Morton himself is a candidate, as is Professor Hilton (William Edmunds), Cyrus’s astrological advisor.

One Body Too Many (1944) has all the trappings of an old dark house movie, but leans heavily on the comedy, and I thought it was hilarious. The majority of jokes land in a funny screenplay by Winston Miller (My Darling Clementine, 1946) and Maxwell Shane (The Mummy’s Hand, 1940.) The latter also wrote Scared Stiff a year later for the same production team.

The are not only one-liners and plays on word, but also a recurring joke about the butler, Merkil (Bela Lugosi), and maid, Matthews (Blanche Yurka), trying to serve poisoned coffee to the houseguests. Merkil says, “There are too many rats in the house,” but none that are interested in drinking “such fine coffee.”

One Body Too Many has been in the public domain for quite some time and the version I saw online shows it. (There seems to be a “restored” version on DVD from Film Detecive, but I’d have to confirm the quality before I purchase it.) Therefore, parts are disjointed and it’s hard to tell if we should blame director Frank McDonald.

His resume doesn’t provide any clues. He was a workhorse, directing over 140 movies and television shows during his 30-plus year career. Among the westerns and war films was one genre-adjacent movie near the end of his career: The Underwater City (1962.) Many were for Pine/Thomas, the B-movie division of Paramount that made this one.

I’m surprised at how much I enjoyed One Body Too Many. There are so many old dark house movies, but this is suddenly one of my favorites. We all know that “horror comedies” are not my cup of tea (or coffee), but if I think of this in terms of being only a comedy, it far exceeds my expectations.