At the beginning of the film, drunk old Uncle Joe falls and dies and the family decides not to tell anyone and just bury him!! This is no ordinary family, that's for sure. You see, they are a greedy pack of lazy jerks and Uncle Joe was their meal ticket...and with him dead they might have to get real jobs. In addition to Joe, the family also regularly sponges off Stella (Ann Sheridan)...a nice lady who is the ultimate enabler. Inexplicably, once she learns of their scheme, she decides to go along with their plot...and that's a problem because an insurance investigator (Victor Mature) is hot for Stella and is spending way too much time around this pack of vultures. There's also a bigger problem when Uncle Joe's girlfriend shows up and when they cannot produce him, she reports him missing. The family also finds out he has insurance and if they can identify some corpse, they can collect. So, again and again, they say that bodies are Uncle Joe...and each time the authorities figure out it isn't.
While this could have been a very funny film and had many interesting elements, I was pretty much irritated by the characters as they were just too selfish and nasty. And, while family loyalty is fine, Stella is the ultimate enabler...and that doesn't make her especially endearing. These are huge problems with the story. I think making them dumber and more kooky would have worked much better than making them lazy and greedy. While a very WEIRD film, "The Trouble With Harry" did this sort of thing better.
While this could have been a very funny film and had many interesting elements, I was pretty much irritated by the characters as they were just too selfish and nasty. And, while family loyalty is fine, Stella is the ultimate enabler...and that doesn't make her especially endearing. These are huge problems with the story. I think making them dumber and more kooky would have worked much better than making them lazy and greedy. While a very WEIRD film, "The Trouble With Harry" did this sort of thing better.