In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based on where my interests lead me and what’s available from my local public library.
As I near (or perhaps have already reached) the age at which one can reasonably be classified as an old lady, I find myself drawn more and more to fictional old ladies who embrace their age and eccentricities and care nothing for what anyone else has to say about them. Margaret Rutherford made a specialty of playing this kind of character in British comedies, including Miss Whitechurch is The Happiest Days of Your Life, Professor Hatton-Jones in Passport to Pimlico, and Miss Marple in four Agatha Christie adaptations that had a lot more Rutherford than Christie in them. But her greatest embodiment of a feisty old lady came with David Lean’s 1945 film of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, where she plays Madame Arcati, the same role that she played four years earlier in a successful London production of Coward’s play.
Lean establishes a tone of unreality for the start, with title cards apparently from a child’s storybook and the (uncredited) voice of Noël Coward setting up the story to come in the fashion of a fairy tale. The visuals of a too-perfect English country home and the too-perfect life of the couple living in it create the expectation that something’s going to crack that façade and also signals that grown-up rules and conventions needn’t be taken all that seriously. Welcome to the home of novelist Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison, who also played the role on stage) and his wife Ruth (Constance Cummings), a middle-aged British couple who apparently have it all.
As part of his research into the occult for a planned novel, Charles has invited the medium Madame Arcati (Rutherford) to perform a séance at their house, and has invited another couple, George and Violet Bradman (Hugh Wakefield and Joyce Carey) to take part as well. None of them believe a bit in the supernatural and are confident that they already know everything there is to know about the world in which they live.
From her first appearance, Rutherford injects a sense of anarchy into the staid drawing-room world of the Condomines like a grey-haired girl scout full of enthusiasms and up for just about anything. We first meet her riding her bike, her cape streaming behind her (the first of several inspired costume choices by Hilda Collins) and the wind ruffling her hair, as she cycles through the countryside. Her entry to the Condomine’s home, popping in through a window rather than using the door like everyone else, is equally unconventional. She then performs several eccentric rituals, without the least trace of self-consciousness, before beginning the séance proper. Though Madame Arcati may seem batty, she proves to have unexpected powers, conjuring up the spirit of Charles’ first wife, Elvira (Kay Hammond, who also played this role on stage), whom only Charles can see and hear.
We know from previous dialogue that Charles had been married before, and that wife #1 was more beautiful than wife #2. Charles assures Ruth he doesn’t care, but Elvira’s unexpected reappearance raises the question of whether he’s being completely honest. You can decide for yourself whether the Condomines would have been better off left to their boring suburban existence or if Madame Arcati opened the portal to a better world for them, but you can be sure of one thing: this film is a successful adaptation of a very funny play that helps expose societal assumptions by leaning into them. It definitely has some dated moments (remarks about “African natives” and assumptions about a woman’s role in marriage among them) but for a work from the 1940s, the cringe factor is not high.
Blithe Spirit was Lean’s first try at a comedy after two Coward dramas, In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed, and his second Technicolor film. It was a commercial and critical success, although some critics found fault with the casting, in particular complaining that Cummings was too attractive to make the play’s primary conceit effective. Coward was more upset with this film, which he wanted to be a version of his play as he wrote it and particularly objected to an alteration near the end of the story which shifts the closing mood in a more conventional and positive direction. The special effects may not seem like so much today (and I quickly got tired of the green-tinted but very corporeal Elvira.), but they were so impressive in 1945 that special effects artist Tom Howard won the first of his two Academy Awards for his work on this film. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 606
Technical details: 96 min.; color; screen ratio 1.37:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD
Extras: interview with Noël Coward scholar Barry Day; episode of the British TV series The Southbank Show on Coward’s career; and the film’s trailer.
Fun Fact: Rex Harrison’s line in which he offers to give his wife a full account of his sex life was omitted in the American release due to censorship.
Parting Thought: Is there a modern-day equivalent to Margaret Rutherford: a successful movie actress of a certain age who embraces her unconventional appearance and channels her inner tomboy while running circles around more conventional characters?
