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The joke seems like cozy whimsy until a seed for Godard's Éloge de l'amour is recognized. There are priorities in 18th-century Scotland, one fights the English only after settling the hash of a rival clan or so orders the patriarch (Morton Selten) with bottle in hand. ("I can die content... when I finish this whiskey," he says, and does.) His son (Robert Donat) prefers frolicking with bonnie lasses over charging into the battlefield, he goes to fetch a misfired cannonball and is blown apart by another. "There's always some cursed interruption!" Stuck in limbo, his spirit duly materializes every night to haunt the ancestral castle, which in present day is property for sale. The descendant is also given Donat's melancholy charm, the potential buyer is an American heiress (Jean Parker). The glass that shatters at midnight, the wind that chills the rooftops, the camera that prowls up a cobweb-strewn staircase—all of it proves to be quite exciting to the Yank whose wealthy daddy (Eugene Pallette) plans to have everything shipped to Florida, "stone by stone, panel by panel." René Clair in Denham Studios, wryly contemplating his own eventual Hollywood acquisition. The arrival of a foreign phantom means a jubilant reception in New York and immigration concerns in Washington, his first view of the new world is a shootout between coppers and gangsters. "Some real Scotch music," not quite, plus gondolas and palm trees for the unveiling of the reconstructed manor, a son et lumière remembered by Franju (Pleins feux sur l'assassin). Ophüls is nearby with La Tendre Ennemie. With Elsa Lanchester, Ralph Bunker, Everley Gregg, Elliott Mason, Patricia Hilliard, Chili Bouchier, Hay Petrie, Quentin McPhearson, and Herbert Lomas. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |