Blithe Spirit

Another of the movies that I recorded months ago but is coming up on TCM soon is Blithe Spirit. The next airing is tomorrow afternoon at 4:45 PM.

Rex Harrison plays Charles Condomine, a successful writer living in one of those English country estates together with second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings), his first wife Elvira having died some years ago. One of the plot points in his next book involves a séance, so Charles decides that he's going to invite some friends over and bring in a local medium to hold a séance.

Of course, everybody knows that this sort of stuff is a giant scam, doesn't everybody? The Condomines invite a couple of friends, Dr. Bradman (Hugh Wakefield) and his wife (Joyce Carey), and get Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford) to do her thing as the medium.

They all get together, and as you can expect, nothing happens. Not long after the séance breaks up and Arcati and the Bradmans head home, there's a sudden, inexplicable rush of wind at the patio door.

Wouldn't you know it, but something did happen. (Obviously, something had to happen, or else there wouldn't be a movie. A green-hued woman enters the scene visible only to Charles, and it's obvious to the viewer that this must be a spirit of some sort. What's obvious to Charles is that this is the spirit of Elvira (Kay Hammond).

Elvira is decidedly unhappy, as she's seen Charles' second wife, and she thinks Ruth isn't right for Charles. Elvira is also unhappy about having been brought back from the dead, although she's not exactly alive either; just in some sort of limbo where she can interact with objects and even talk to Charles. So she talks to him, and anybody else who happens to be around for these conversations only hears Charles so they think something's seriously wrong.

Charles is eventually able to convince Ruth and Arcati that Elvira has come back; and Ruth wants Arcati to help send Elvira back to where she came from. But no matter what Arcati tries, it doesn't work, making everybody including Elvira a bit testy.

If that's not bad enough, there's a series of accidents involving Charles and some of the hired help. This give Ruth a frightening insight: Elvira has decided that she wants Charles for herself and not let Ruth have her anymore, and the only way to do this is to kill Charles so they'll both be in the afterlife together. At this point even more shocking turns of events take place.

Blithe Spirit is based on a play by Noël Coward, who according to IMDb provided the narration. I'm not as big a fan of Coward's comedies as people who are fans of the stage or people who are Anglophiles tend to be, so there are going to be people who like this more than I did.

Not that I disliked Blithe Spirit, however. I did have a few problems, mostly with Kay Hammond who seemed a bit too shrill. I've never seen the play, so I don't know if Elvira was supposed to be as irritating as she is in this movie adaptation. Technically, however, the movie is a treat. It was filmed in Technicolor which is quite vivid, and the special effects are very good too.

I had thought about doing a post on Blithe Spirit earlier, but I could have sworn that when I searched on the TCM Shop, they didn't have a DVD available. The opening of the print TCM showed, however, is the Criterion logo, so I looked there, and sure enough, they have a box set of David Lean directing Noël Coward in four movies. Three of them (Blithe Spirit, In Which We Serve at 11:30 AM, and Brief Encounter at 6:30 PM) are on tomorrow's schedule; the only one that isn't is This Happy Breed. Of course, being a Criterion release, it's quite pricey.

Apparently there's a new version of Blithe Spirit in the works, although the release date got pushed back by the coronavirus nonsense and it's not set to be released until sometime in 2021.