During the revolutionary war, Melody Allen (Marjorie Reynolds) and Horatio Prim (Lou Costello) are mistaken for traitors, shot, and cursed. In 1946, the ghosts of Melody and Horatio have a chance to remove the curse, with the help of five people, including Dr. Ralph Greenway (Bud Abbott), a descendent of a man who wronged Horatio.
Here is an Abbott and Costello movie where Bud Abbott and Lou Costello barely interact. Most of their films have little in the way of stories, being just vehicles for their standard routines. This makes the first movie of theirs you see pretty funny, but each successive one less and less so. The Time of Their Lives was an attempt to do something different, putting them in an actual story, and letting jokes arise naturally. And it almost works. Almost.
Bud Abbott shows he could have made it on his own. Playing a double role, his revolutionary butler is a slightly meaner version of his standard persona, but as Dr. Greenway, he’s a pleasant and noble, if misguided and foolish man who is the victim, not the perpetrator of petty cruelties. Abbott’s turn at playing something different results in him being far more humorous and engaging than normal. For most of the film, he interacts with a nondescript group of characters, except for Gale Sondergaard’s psychic; Sondergaard, who often played sinister parts, could never be considered nondescript and puts in another excellent character performance.
But Lou Costello’s ghostly tinker is just the same Costello from his other films and gets tiring quickly. He falls down, runs into walls, wiggles about, and acts frightened of everything. It just isn’t funny. He spends most of the film with Marjorie Reynolds, who plays the straight-woman (more or less). It’s refreshing to see him interacting with someone else for a change, but in addition to refreshing, it needed to be humorous.
The script creates far more frustrations than jokes. Almost every problem that pops up could easily be solved by the ghosts being ghosts, but for some reason, they ignore their strengths. When the police show up to take an important piece of furniture, the ghosts could have grabbed it themselves, or taken the cops’ weapons, or done a million things, but all they do is tug on hats.
For an afternoon matinee with the kids, The Time of Their Lives will do, particularly with young kids around Halloween. I first saw it when I was five or six, and enjoyed it, but even then, it wasn’t anything special.