Red Lights Ahead

This slight comedy looks at the Wallace household, weakly governed by a genial old fool (Roger Imhof) who takes pride in serving as his fraternal lodge doorman. His many offspring are a mildly eccentric, self-absorbed lot. The script dwells on their trivial tribulations (and chucks in some unexpected digs at spiritualism.) Just as one gets comfortable with the characters, the writers inject the creaky cliché of having the clan falsely believe they've come into a fortune. Non-hilarity ensues, and the preposterous denouement sours whatever goodwill the actors have generated.

RED LIGHTS is not unwatchable, but I question if even the cast's descendants would sit thru it twice.

I'm a great fan of comic actor Andy Clyde, so it was a particular pleasure to find this short feature with him at the top of the cast list. Lucille Gleason and Roger Imhof are a married couple with four almost-adult children. They're not particularly rich, but he's working and they own their own house and have his paycheck to live on. Imhof loves to belong to various lodges, and at one of them he latches onto a good-sounding speculation, a gold mine open only to lodge members. He wants to do well by his family, but Lucille doesn't wish to risk their little capital. Enter Andy Clyde, Lucille's father. He's just sold his junk business and has come to stay.

When Imhof puts a mortgage on the house to raise the capital, Lucille is upset. Then, suddenly, the mine pays off and money starts to flow in. But with great wealth comes an entirely different set of problems.

The movie is full of low-key bickering and the sort of mild, homespun humor that made Andy Clyde's Columbia shorts so much fun. He had been playing this elderly character for ten years at this point, first at Sennett, even though at the time he made this, he was 44 years old and four years younger than the woman playing his daughter!

It might have been the entry to a starring feature career for Andy, but alas, this was the last movie produced by Chesterfield, one of the sturdier Poverty Row companies. It seems to have disappeared into Republic Pictures, and although Andy continued his Columbia short subject series until 1956, played comic sidekicks in eighty features, and continued acting on TV into the mid-1960s -- he was a regular on THE REAL MCCOYS, when he had actually caught up to his character's age -- he never got that starring role. But he made a lot of funny movies, and this is a good one.

Bickering kids. lots of running up and down stairs. Pa Wallace goes off to his lodge meeting, and it took 15 minutes just for that to happene. He meets some out of towners, and the Wallaces invest in a gold mine...What could go wrong ?? Lots of loud yelling, although talkies had been around for six years already. Ma Wallace is Lucille Gleason, real life wife of stumbling, bumbling detective James Gleason in so many detective stories. The middle part of the film really drags on with nothingness ... while we wait to see what happens with the gold mines. Directed by Roland Reed... he only directed SEVEN films... one in the 1920s, four in the 1930s, one in the 1940s, and one in the 1950s. How odd. and this is from Chesterfield Pictures... they were only around for twelve years, but put out TONS of films. Sound and picture quality are pretty terrible. If there's a good copy somewhere, it could use a restoration. There are a couple of funny bits -- all of Pa's lodge costumes. Some clever jokes. All done in 70 minutes.

Poverty Row studio Chesterfield Productions went out of business after this film was released. And typically it was a remake of another film In The Money that was done three years earlier.

But these minor studios occasionally came up with some decent films and Red Lights Ahead was one of them. It has horrible production values, but the cast gave good performances led by Andy Clyde who made a lot of money in the junk business.

Turns out he's going to need it. He's got himself nothing but junk in the way of grandchildren. Ann Doran, Paula Stone, Ben Alexander, and Frank Coghlan are four prize packages who are four millstones around the neck of Clyde's daughter Lucille Gleason. Her husband Roger Imhof is a decent sort who works hard and his big pleasure is the Order of the Whales Lodge.

And Imhoff sees a golden opportunity in gold mine stock that the visiting Grand Harpoon of the lodge Sam Flint and his young associate future cowboy star Jack Randall are selling. Randall has been dating Stone and has been laying the ground work for Flint to come in and hook Imhoff.

The kids see a path to easy money to continue their wastrel lives and urge father to buy. It takes Clyde to straighten the whole mess out in the end.

A major studio probably could have done more with this film, but it still holds up well as good entertainment and is quite the advertisement for hard work and thrift.

And one something looks too good to be true, it probably isn't.