The Time of Their Lives - 1946

This Abbott & Costello comedy was made not long after the conclusion of World War II, and the shadow of that conflict, which is never mentioned, lays across the story. The early part of the film is set in 1780, at the time of the American Revolution, and Lou Costello's character (the travelling tinker Horatio Prim) has been given a letter of patriotic recommendation by none other than General George Washington. Horatio has come to the wealthy Danbury Estate to show his girlfriend Nora (Anne Gillis), a bond-servant there, the letter. The two plan to elope, once they get permission from the kindhearted Melody Allen (Marjorie Reynolds) who is the fiancée of the owner of the estate.

Before any of that happens, though, disaster strikes when the fiancée discovers that her betrothed plans to sell-out the Colonial army to the British, and estate servant Cuthbert Greenway (Bud Abbott), full of jealousy over Nora the bonds-woman, traps Horatio in a trunk. Shortly, Horatio and Melody meet accidentally in the estate stable, and agree to team-up, to escape off the estate and warn General Washington of the treason against him. Instead, the pair get shot down as traitors by a raiding group of colonial soldiers and their corpses are then thrown into a nearby well on the property. The leader of the raiders takes a piece of wood and writes out a crude notice that is nailed to the well notifying everyone that the bodies of two nameless traitors lie below, and then he curses their dead spirits to be trapped on the estate until "crack of doom" unless some proof appears certifying their loyal character.

Whew! That's not typical Abbott & Costello at all, and between the dead bodies being thrown into the well and a lingering camera shot of the corpses together down at the bottom, there is a shadowy latent seriousness in the background of The Time of Their Lives about the fate of those who died in wartime. This was something not far from the thoughts of many moviegoers who had received or knew of casualty-notification telegrams from the War Department from a conflict in which more than one million military personnel died just a year and more ago.

The plot of The Time of Their Lives speeds forward to the current time (1946) and the ghosts of Horatio and Melody are boringly stuck on the estate, wishing they could go on to their eternal reward. For nearly 165 years the two have been pinning all their hopes of release from the Danbury Estate "curse" on the discovery of that letter from Washington that would validate that Horatio (and apparently by inference) Melody were not traitors at all. The system of spiritual jurisprudence here appears to be a sort of Hollywood Americanism that requires the living to know the truth about Horatio and Melody in order to nullify the old curse, and a recommendation from Washington equals salvation.

Meanwhile, the estate is rebuilt, new people move in, and Costello and Marjorie Reynolds can now "haunt" them and try to guide them toward finding the long-missing letter. We the audience know the letter is in a secret drawer of an antique clock, hidden there all the way back when the Danbury Estate was being looted and burned on the night the pair of ghosts were shot down.

Most of The Time of Their Lives is striving for pure levity and preoccupied with making haunted house jokes and using some pretty good special effects to do it. Abbott and Costello don't necessarily work together as a team directly in this story, its really Marjorie Reynolds and Costello doing the honors as the lead characters, but Bud Abbott plays both the vicious Cuthbert of the 1700's and a neurotic 20th century psychiatrist who comes to stay at the estate. He ends up playing a major part in trying to hunt down that letter which is the "key" to the spooks finally exiting to a Hollywood Heaven (and a final ironic joke just before the end credits start).

The plot itself, besides skidding intentionally or not through the spiritual ramifications of traitors and war dead, is otherwise light-hearted fare and the physical comedy is the usual A & C style. Marjorie Reynolds provides a lot of running around and plays Costello's "straight man," and does it pretty well.

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Original Page September 3, 2025