HAY MUERTOS QUE NO HACEN RUIDO (1946)
aka There Are Dead That Rise
Article 4608 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-15-2014
Directed by Humberto Gomez Landero
Featuring German Valdes, Marcelo Chavez, Amanda del Llano
Country: Mexico
What it is: Comic mystery

An aspiring singer finds himself under suspicion for a murder in a spooky old house.

I was lucky enough to find a copy of this movie on YouTube, but not lucky enough to find one with English subtitles. Furthermore, since the movie is fairly heavy on dialogue, I know that I’m missing enough of the plot and the humor to prevent me from giving a really effective analysis of how good it is, though I will say that the verbal humor had better be pretty good to maintain the viewer’s interest for the one hour forty-two minute running time. From a visual point of view, the most satisfying sequence has the hero, realizing that he’s likely to be fingered for a murder he didn’t commit, trying to elude the police by pretending to be a wax figure. As for the fantastic content, my various sources claim that that there are ghosts present in the movie, but visually, I see no evidence of that. There is, however, a spooky old house full of wax figures and secret passages, so there’s a little of the “old dark house” vibe going for it. The English title refers to a plot twist that occurs fairly late in the game, and is perhaps the element that comes closest to delivering us anything even remotely in the way of ghosts.