I was pretty harsh on the concept of the ensemble cast radio play comedy in my review of The Gift of Gab, the single Bela Lugosi/Boris Karloff collaboration that brought me no joy. Perhaps it was the fact that Lugosi & Karloff were only two of thirty featured Universal Pictures stars fleshing out the vaudevillian vignettes meant to support the Phillip “Gift of Gab” Gabney vehicle. Perhaps I was just too high coming off the glorious heights of the pair’s first & best collaboration, 1934’s The Black Cat, and Gift of Gab was a letdown of a follow-up. Maybe it’s just a terrible movie. Either way, after less awe-inspiring titles like Son of Frankenstein & Black Friday, another Lugosi-Karloff ensemble comedy doesn’t play nearly as disappointingly. You’ll Find Out is far from the most exciting project Karloff & Lugosi worked on together, but since it came from a time after the decline in popularity of Universal’s famous monsters brand that made their careers, it’s about all you can ask for in terms of Karloff-Lugosi content. You’ll Find Out exceeds Gift of Gab both in quality & quantity; what was essentially minuscule cameos in Gab are fleshed out into featured parts as antagonists here. They also threw in a part for Peter Lorre, making this the only instance that he & Lugosi appeared together onscreen despite their shared Hungarian origins & similar career paths. A nice piece of lagniappe, that.

Unfortunately, You’ll Find Out isn’t exactly a Karloff-Lugosi vehicle like The Black Cat or The Raven. Instead, the film was meant to capitalize on the popularity of real-life radio personality Kay Kyser. Kyser was famous for hosting a music quiz called Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (oh God, don’t focus on the first three letters of that acronym). On the program, Kyser, often dubbed “The Ol’ Professor” & dressed in a scholar’s cap & gown, asked live audience members for bits of musical trivia and followed up their answers with obnoxious, “humorous” questions like “What’s the difference between a weasel, a measel, and an easel?” (in tandem with a rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel, of course), much to the delight of an easily-pleased public. Har har. As this was during the height of big band music’s peak popularity, Kyser & his live orchestra rode the success of the craze for all it was worth, including just as many feature films that Lugosi had managed to film together in their unlikely, rivalrous collaboration – eight.

Kyser & his wacky crew are a little shrill & old-fashioned in the outdated comedy shenanigans that threaten to sink You’ll Find Out. If it weren’t for Lorre, Karloff, and Lugosi, the film would be a total wash. In a flimsy plot involving the Kyser clan entertaining an heiress during a part she’s throwing at a spooky castle (“What a beautiful spot for a murder!”) the band ends up saving her life from three oldschool horror creeps (guess who) conspiring to take hold of her inheritance. Karloff plays a seemingly congenial judge & friend of the family who pretends, poorly, that he has the heiress’ best interests in mind, despite being an obvious creep. Lugosi has the much more entertaining role of a turban-wearing mystic named Prince Saliano. Saliano insists that he communicates with the dead & that “The spirits are strongly displeased with the skeptical,” a sentiment that gives him free reign to torture the party guests. Lorre, for his part, plays a supposed “psychic expert”, brought in by Karloff’s corrupt judge to “expose” Saliano as a phoney to the unsuspecting heiress. Lorre is obviously not who he says he is & the three creeps are obviously in creepy cahoots.

The best moments of You’ll Find Out are the mere pleasure of seeing Karloff, Lorre, and Lugosi share a single frame. This happens exactly twice in the film: once when they’re quietly conspiring in a study & again at the climax when they’re holding the entire party hostage at gunpoint. In that second instance, Karloff & Lorre are brandishing pistols while Lugosi, again establishing himself as the ultimate horror movie badass, is sporting a fistful of dynamite. Although Lorre & Karloff are billed before Lugosi, Lugosi delivers what is by far the most interesting performance of the trio. As the same fate also befell him in The Raven, Son of Frankenstein and, arguably, even The Black Cat (although that last one is easily the most well-balanced of his Karloff collaborations in terms of sharing the spotlight), that distinction seemed to be his curse. Not only does Lugosi’s Prince Saliano get his own secret dungeon packed with high-tech gadgetry in You’ll Find Out; he also gets to put all the gadgets to use in the film’s centerpiece – an over-the-top séance in which he plays with Tesla coils, shows the heiress a vision of her dead father, and tries to kill her with a falling chandelier. During this séance, Lugosi delivers the film’s best line: “Presently I shall assume a state of trance in which the outer mind merges with the astral portion of the human ego. The Spirit of Evil is trying to enter this room, but the Fires of Death will guard us.” There’s also a great moment in the climactic scuffle where all of his séance equipment goes off at once, making the mansion look like an automated haunted house on the fritz.

You’d be forgiven for believing that You’ll Find Out is a trfile of an antiquated studio comedy. It most certainly is, especially in early scenes that focus on Kay Kyser’s hokey big band shenanigans. Any oldschool horror fan with a little bit of patience will have plenty of fun with the Lorre-Karloff-Lugosi trio’s dastardly villainy, though. It’s true that Lugosi steals the show in You’ll Find Out (doesn’t he always?), but the image of the three horror greats working together is the rarest of treats, something well worth putting up with a failed vaudeville gag or two depending on how much you love Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and -the most loveable of them all- Bela Lugosi.

-Brandon Ledet