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The writer's dilemma and the séance of inspiration, "make it a real rouser!" Noël Coward's gag is painstakingly fabricated out of Hamlet, the spiritualist's art is just a joke to the haughty novelist until the afterlife intrudes upon his marriage most impishly. Posh skeptics (Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings) invite the dotty medium (Margaret Rutherford) for a dash of condescension and instead get a gateway into "the unseen," in drifts the phantom of the first wife (Kay Hammond). Phosphorescent-green but for scarlet lipstick and nail polish, the otherworldly coquette enjoys needling the ex when not terrifying her rival with levitating furniture: "The echoing halls of eternity have in no way impaired your native vulgarity." Between Topper and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, England's supernatural ménage staged by David Lean as the elegant fissure separating the clipped precision of aristocratic manners from the great unknown beyond the drawing-room. While preserving Coward's brittle repartee, the camera is grateful for the chance to track wordlessly through billowing curtains and doors that open and close by themselves, and to fiddle with the various gradations of Denham Technicolor (a training ground for Ronald Neame). Rutherford barrels through like Michel Simon in drag, bouncing across polished floors in long woolen scarves, treating her conjurations like bubbling Dada, and generally adding welcome salt to the story's dry martinis. Harrison meanwhile privately relishes being the bigamist center of a spectral tug of war: "If you only made an effort to be a little more friendly, we might all have quite a jolly time." Quine's Bell, Book and Candle has the suggestive junction of the literary and the mystical, Lester helps himself to the colorized ectoplasm for How I Won the War. With Hugh Wakefield, Joyce Carey, and Jacqueline Clarke.
--- Fernando F. Croce |