Scared Stiff

The Oz Tin Man Jack Haley plays a soft daydreaming reporter who continually irritates his editor by missing out on real news stories. He keeps his job because he is the nephew of the newspaper boss. His main passion is chess and by chance he ends up in a place that houses the very valuable jeweled chess pieces of Kublai Khan. There is a dead body and an armed killer and intrigue where he is forced to stay. But rather than just running away from all that he is more anxious to get to a grape harvest 40 miles away to cover a routine story for the newspaper.

All the passengers of a Greyhound bus are forced to stay at a boarding house and winery combined while a dead body found on the bus is being investigated. The boarding house is home to eccentric twin brothers who each own their respective halves of a valuable chess set. Among the passengers who have to stay there is a boy genius who is also a prankster. In a crowded room he declares that there is a murderer among them while they all have to wait for the sheriff to arrive.

This lighthearted Paramount mystery is full of incident. There is a hilarious scene at the end when a bunch of crooks are retrieved from a wine vat. The film could have been a lot funnier with the right cast but the mystery element is interesting enough. It's just that Jack Haley and the background music is a little too overmuch at times. But I would watch this again and also 'One Body Too Many' (1944) which is another of Jack Haley's comic mysteries.