Blithe Spirit (1945)

It’s part of movie lore: when Noel Coward broke into movies in 1941, he was already adept at directing actors in dramas and comedies, but since he had no experience directing action scenes, he hired David Lean to direct and edit them and Ronald Neame to photograph them. In Which We Serve, based on the combat experiences of Coward’s friend Lord Mountbatten, was a great success in wartime England, and Coward went on to produce three more films based on his own plays, This Happy Breed (1944), Blithe Spirit (1945), and Brief Encounter (1945), all directed by David Lean. 

The play of Blithe Spirit had been an enormous success in London’s West End and on Broadway in 1941. Hollywood wanted to make a film of it but, dissatisfied with how they had mishandled some of his plays (Private Lives [1931], Tonight Is Ours [1933]), Coward sold the rights to Cineguild, a film production company owned by David Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony Havelock-Allan. Since This Happy Breed had been filmed in Technicolor and was very successful critically and commercially, Lean decided to use the color process again on Blithe Spirit, despite the cumbersome process having to involve Natalie Kalmus, the wife of Dr. Herbert T. Kalmus, the founder of the Technicolor company. 

I recently gained access to two versions of the film available via online streaming. The first was in woeful condition, with horrible pastel colors smeared across the images indiscriminately. The restored version, available through Criterion and financed by the David Lean Foundation, is a marvelous spectacle all by itself. While the colors are slightly unstable, having to do, apparently, with subtleties in the lighting, the restored film looks splendid, with all the photographic glories of black-and-white in three-strip technicolor. A prismatic camera lens captured the color image on three separate strips of film that were layered when the film was printed to combine the colors. Natalie Kalmus was the Technicolor advisor who worked on the film, as she also had done on This Happy Breed, and she drove David Lean to distraction. She had authority over every decision made with regard to lighting, set decoration, costume design, and makeup, since the color process didn’t capture colors naturally, but had to be very carefully manipulated. This might explain why some of the colors in the film, like Rex Harrison’s indigo bathrobe or Margaret Rutherford’s scarlet dress at the séance, stand out more than others. Kay Hammond, who plays a ghost in the film, is made up and costumed in light green shades (except for red lipstick and nails) – cleverly using a color effect rather than a camera trick to alert us to her ghostly condition. 

Charles Condomine is a successful mystery novelist who, doing research for a new novel he’s working on, persuades his wife Ruth and two of their friends, George and Violet Bradman, to join him in a séance conducted by Madame Arcati, a spirit medium. Following her directions by sitting around a small table with their outspread hands touching, Charles, Ruth, and Doctor and Mrs. Bradman watch Madame Arcati as she chooses from among some records the Irving Berlin song “Always,” turns out the light, then addresses someone named Daphne, who causes the table to move – once for yes, two for no – in response to Madame Arcati’s questions. Getting no results, she goes into a trance, screams and falls down. The table then begins to rise and, when the four of them try pushing it down, it tips over. Just as Charles asks if he should pick pick it up, a voice tells him to leave it where it is. He asks Ruth if she said it, but she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The voice speaks again, but only Charles can hear it. He turns on the light and tells the others he was only joking. Madame Arcati is revived with some brandy, asks what happened and when told that nothing happened, tells them she’s convinced there is another psychic person in the house. When Mafame Arcati leaves, into the room through the closed glass door comes the ghost of Charles first wife, Elvira, who died seven years ago (she laughed so hard she brought on a heart attack). Charles can see and converse with her, but nobody else can. Ruth becomes convinced that Elvira has returned to ruin her marriage to Charles. She seeks the help of Madame Arcati, but she only knows how to raise ghosts, not how to lay them. 

The oddity of a play about the dead returning as ghosts being extremely popular during wartime (Blithe Spirit’s first run in London was 1,997 performances) was matched not just by its popularity on Broadway but by the comparable run of Arsenic and Old Lace, which opened on Broadway in January 1941 and closed in 1944 after 1,444 performances. Coward told Lean to avoid changing anything when filming the play. Lean added only some wordless exterior scenes, but he altered the ending drastically. Instead of merely leaving the house at the end of the play, provoking the ghosts of Ruth and Elvira to, poltergeist-like, tear it apart piece by piece, Lean has the ghosts assist Charles out the door and into his roadster. Then Lean sits the two ghostly wives on a bridge past which Charles’s car careens – and crashes. The wives move apart on the bridge and Charles’s ghost drops between them. The End. Despite Noel Coward’s furious objections to this alteration, it somehow works in the intensified make believe of cinema. 

The film is perfectly cast, with Kay Hammond and Margaret Rutherford returning to the roles they originated onstage. Rutherford is especially delightful as the extremely eccentric Madame Arcati. Rex Harrison is utterly beautiful as Charles, his performance making the absolute most of Coward’s lines. Lines like Elvira’s: “I haven’t seen a movie in seven years.” To which Charles replies “Let me be the first to congratulate you.” Or the line omitted from the US release of the film in which Ruth goes down a list of Charles’s amorous conquests and Charles interjects: "If you're trying to compile an inventory of my sex life, I feel it only fair to warn you that you've omitted several episodes. I shall consult my diary and give you a complete list after lunch."

When he reviewed the film My Fair Lady, Stanley Kauffmann remarked that it

is worth every penny of the $17 million it reportedly cost because it preserves Rex Harrison’s performance. Whatever one thinks of the musical, of the very idea of the musical, his performance is clearly a flower of artistic elegance with its roots in three-hundred-year-old comic styles, a miracle of ease that results from a lifetime’s training of superb talents... But—as against the play from which it was taken—the word “great” has, as usual, been too generously applied. Only Harrison’s performance begins to deserve the term. His first name has never seemed more apt.(1)

Harrison’s brilliance is far better served and supported in Blithe Spirit. It is a classic in the truest sense of the term. 75 years later, in its restored state, it still shimmers.

(1) The New Republic, November 15, 1964.