Peter Foley (Rex Lease) is deeply in dept to G.W. Parker (Sam Hardy), and needs his inheritance to pay him off. His problem is that he needs a wife to get it, and his intended bride Alice Blake (Vera Reynolds) has been delayed. So Parker supplies him with a fake wife for the night, Julia (Nita Martan), who happens to be the girlfriend of jealous cop Bull Morgan (Paul Hurst), as well as several others—she’s a popular girl. Peter, G.W., and Julia head to the ghostly home of Peter’s Uncle Henry, who will inherit if Peter can’t prove he’s married, where they are supposed to meet with the lawyer. Joe Blair (Robert Livingston) also wants to marry Alice, so brings her to the old house to see that Peter is married, and thus turn to him. Morgan shows up too and hijacks ensue.
This is an Old Dark House movie mixed with a bedroom farce. Sure, the expected elements are here: there’s a spooky old house filled with secret passageways, an inheritance, a storm that maroons everyone there, an exterior threat, moans and screams, and people disappearing. But all that is, for the most part, just the setting. The storm isn’t to keep everyone trapped with a killer, but to force everyone to hide from each other by jumping in and out of beds.
Borrowed Wives is yet another Poverty Row flick from Frank R. Stayer, who made a career from the edges of the Old Dark House subgenre. This is one of his better works. It recycles old jokes and old situations, but does so in a reasonably amusing fashion. There’s plenty of mistaken identities, ducking under blankets, crawling under furniture, and slipping from room to room, observed only by the elderly woman who is shocked by the morals of the young. It all works out the way you’d expect, but then no one is looking for a big surprise at the end of a farce.
Other Poverty Row horror films from director Frank R. Stayer: Tangled Destinies (1932), The Monster Walks (1932), The Vampire Bat (1933), The Ghost Walks (1934), and Condemned to Live (1935).