Blithe Spirit

Rating:
Summary: NO ONE DOES THIS BETTER THAN THE BRITISH....
Review: This is the film adaptation of Noel Coward's comedic play. It is a fast-paced, drolly funny, comedic fantasy of the kind in which the British always excel. The screenplay is sharply acerbic and witty, with the actors engaged in the rapid-fire delivery of its lines. As they say, timing is everything, and here, the timing could not be better.

The plot revolves a well-known novelist, Charles Condomine, played by the ever urbane Rex Harrison. He has been married to his second wife, the no-nonsense Ruth (Constance Cummings) for the past five years, after having been a widower for seven. They live in a lovely house in the English countryside. As part of his research for a new novel that he is writing, he has arranged for a small dinner party, inviting another couple as well as an eccentric medium who calls herself Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford).

After dinner, Madame Arcati conducts a seance. She makes a series of rather odd and funny attempts to speak to the spirit world, and something changes, but the only one who knows it is Charles. It seems that Madame Arcati has conjured up the spirit of his long dead wife, Elvira (Kay Hammond), but the only one who can see and hear her is him.

Of course, the re-appearance of Elvira creates all kinds of mischief in the household, both upstairs and downstairs. Needless to say, Ruth is not happy, when Charles reveals what has happened, and while initially skeptical, she quickly becomes a believer when she sees things happen that are otherwise inexplicable.

When it becomes clear that Elvira is not going to go willingly, and Ruth is not going to let her rival stay without putting up a fight, Charles is caught in the middle. He soon finds out, however, that Elvira has special plans for him that soon backfire on all of them. When Madame Arcati is called back to try and put things to right, more mischief is concocted by those in the spectral realm.

Excellent performances are given by the entire cast. For my money, however, it is Margaret Rutherford who steals the show out from under her fellow thespians for her wacky, over the top performance as Madame Arcati. Margaret Rutherford infuses her character with a wonderful combination of British bluster and eccentric mannerisms that makes Madame Arcati absolutely memorable and quite funny.

This darkly humorous production is deftly directed by David Lean, and, while it could have used some fine-tuning towards the end, it is a minor point. Those who love wonderful vintage films will certainly enjoy this one.

Rating:
Summary: Always
Review: This Rank/Two Cities film directed by David Lean was produced by Noel Coward, an adaptation of his own play with screenplay by Lean, Ronald Neame and Anthony Havelock-Allan. At first the treatment is exhausting, with snappy repartee reading like Neil Simon in double time. We're trapped in Coward's idea of how married people interact, and the falseness is stagebound. Margaret Rutherford scores a few laughs with her body language as a medium Rex Harrison has invited to his house for a seance. The seance itself is indifferently presented but it is after it is over, when the spirit of Harrison's first wife is conjured up, that the film comes alive too. The humour isn't in the"blithe"-ness of the ghost, it's in the reaction of Harrison's present wife, Constance Cummings, who unlike Harrison is unable to perceive the presence.
It's always amusing to watch movies where the actors have to pretend to ignore other actors playing ghosts, and this seems particularly tough when the garish Techicolour gives Kay Hammond a sickly green glow. One can excuse the obvious incompatibility with Harrison as a youthful error, due to her death, or simply to fit into Coward's scheme. And Lean introduces her by delaying Harrison's acknowledgment, which allows her to witness the situation she has entered. However the gimmick wears thin and there are slow periods we must endure before Coward's mechanics jump us into the next act.
It's a shame that the plot deprives us of Cummings just when we have learned to value her the most, even when she gets to deliver Coward's mysogynistic line about Harrison being "hag-ridden". That this notion ultimately becomes the theme of the play is probably more sour than Coward wished to reveal. And the material reads as being unfair to the second wife.
The resulting action is flatulent, with Lean failing to re-energise Rutherford, and a montage of her efforts to exorcise hindered by an obtrusive music score by Richard Addinsell and the London Philharmonic. Lean does manage to invest the climax with slight pathos, though the conclusion is sheer farce.
It is on reflection that one realises how thin this play is. It is said that Coward wrote it in 6 days. In her 5001 Nights at the Movies collection, Pauline Kael tells us that is was prepared to provide war-torn England with some comedy relief, and that on stage it seemed "pleasantly airy".
The thing that is most curious in the film is Harrison's wish for the ghost to co-exist with his marriage, that he cannot understand why his living wife can be so disturbed. However if Cummings agreed with this thought, I suppose there would be no conflict, and Harrison thereby has to take this attitude. The final explaination for the appearance somehow involves a servant, a point turned to blather, perhaps evidence of a writer rushing to deadline, but also a question that remains unanswered by the end, with Irving Berlin's Always as a clue.

Rating:
Summary: Where is this title?
Review: This was allegedly suppose to come out a month ago but nothing! Anyone have any other news on the release of this great movie? I would think since I pre-ordered it from Amazon.ca that they would've contacted me but I've heard nothing. Nice!