BEFORE: I realize this wouldn't count as a Halloween or horror film to most people, but I needed a link out of the Dracula-based films, and this movie provided one. Anyway, it's about ghosts, only they're the friendly kind, I think. I'm going to end my Shocktober with four films about ghosts, and thankfully they're going to get scarier again as we approach October 31.
Honestly, I've got a lot of other fears right now, so I don't need to be watching a scary movie. In 2 days I turn 50 years old, so that's one fear, the fear of aging - and the only positive thing I can say about it is that it beats the alternative. On my birthday my wife and I are flying to Dallas to start our 2nd BBQ Crawl, but that also adds fear of flying into the mix. I'm fairly OK with being on an airplane, for me it's not the fear of flying, it's the fear of crashing. Because you can't tell me that it doesn't happen, and even though I've flown many times without that happening, I hate thinking that I'm increasing the odds every time I step on a plane. I know, I know, modern air travel is very safe, but nothing anywhere is 100% safe.
Now there's news about flooding in Texas, so let's add the fear of drowning and fear of natural disasters into the mix. What do you do when you have non-refundable plane tickets and hotel reservations, but some of the places you're planning to visit have just been declared disaster areas? Statistically, this has to happen for every tornado, earthquake and wildfire out there - there's always someone planning to visit that exact location, and their plans have to be changed. No horror movie can possibly be as scary as getting stuck in an airport, or finding out that your hotel is now under water, and your entire vacation is a disaster.
Last year, there was a big tropical storm moving up the East Coast while we were on vacation, and by the time we hit Nashville (which was unseasonably cold and rainy our first night there) I was getting e-mails from Delta Airlines urging us to consider changing our flight. But doing so would have meant leaving early, and not getting a chance to see the beautiful city of Nashville, so we stayed the course, tried to enjoy ourselves, and thankfully the storm abated and there was only a little rain falling when we landed back in New York. So we're sticking to our plan for now, when we get down to Dallas we'll have to inquire about the flooding in Austin and determine if we need to alter our route, that's the best we can do.
Hedda Hopper carries over from "Dracula's Daughter" - Hedda Hopper was in "Topper"? That just seems weird, that it rhymes.
THE PLOT: A fun-loving couple, finding that they died and are now ghosts, decide to shake up the stuffy lifestyle of a friend.
AFTER: I've heard so much about this film over the years that I'm kind of surprised that it's not on that list of "1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die". Maybe I was confusing it with "Top Hat", I'm not sure. But still, this is a classic, right? The film that launched Cary Grant as a major star in the 1930's, if I'm not mistaken. But truly, all I really knew about it before watching it was that it had ghosts in it. Thematically, that was enough for me to (sort of) lump it in with Halloween films.
Cary Grant plays George Kerby (that's a weird last name, shouldn't it be "Kirby"?) who's a rich man that sits on the board of a bank, but doesn't take that responsibility seriously - he and his wife don't take much seriously, they're a fun-loving couple who enjoy dining, dancing and drinking. Oh, and driving, only George prefers to drive with his feet for some reason, while he sits on top of the seat. Was this a thing back in the 1930's? Some weird fad like wearing big fur coats and sitting in the rumble seat while mixing gin and tonics? Was drinking and driving legal back then? I'm not even sure. Anyway, driving fast gets him to the bank board meeting (for once) but afterwards they're speeding back across Long Island, I assume, and they miss the hairpin turn and crash the car. Kids, this is why sensible people don't drive with their feet.
So they're dead, but it's not a gory death, and they become ghosts - which, let's remember, are a bunch of hokum, just like hypnotism, no matter how many "Ghost Hunter" shows there are on TLC. (I don't know for sure which cable network has the most Halloween-themed programming, but I'm betting it's the Food Network, with shows like "Halloween Wars", "Halloween Baking Championship" and now "Halloween Gingerbread Challenge", which are all running in nightly marathons all month long - Jesus, enough already!) Anyway, the Kerbys decide that they haven't ascended to the next plane for some reason, possibly because they haven't done enough good deeds. So they set out to bring some fun into their friend, bank president Cosmo Topper's life.
After Topper buys their old sports car (which doesn't make much sense, because why buy a crashed car that he'd have to fix when he could just buy that same model in perfect shape...) the Kerbys appear to him, since they can become visible or invisible at will, and they take him out on the town for a night of drinking, dancing and flirting. Unfortunately, Topper's never had a drink before, so he ends up drunk, and all efforts by the ghosts go awry in screwball fashion, so he ends up punching out a cab driver and there's a big brawl on the sidewalk. He gets arrested, thrown in jail, and the newspaper headlines are all about him being out on the town with a mysterious blonde, who didn't hang around long enough for a photo.
Naturally this puts a strain on his marriage, his wife thinks the marriage is over and Topper moves out for a while, into a hotel where more comic mishaps ensue. It seems there used to be a thing called a "hotel detective" who was responsible for making sure that nobody had guests in their room, and that everyone signed in at the front desk, because apparently in the 1930's there was no hanky-panky or shenanigans allowed in a hotel. Yet in modern society we now know that the vast majority of affairs and shenanigan-like activity takes place in hotels, so I imagine that job got phased out some time in the 1960's.
Marion Kerby wonders if she's still legally married now that she's dead, so that explains her flirting with Topper - but George Kerby is still jealous in the afterlife, so he fights to get Marion back - even though she was probably never gone in the first place. And Mrs. Topper learns that the scandal that her husband caused was just the ice-breaker she needed to make friends among the upper crust ladies, so apparently all is forgiven. That's the main moral here, that women need to forgive their husbands when they have affairs, because it's better for them in the long run. Wow, that's an outdated moral, but just like in Shakespeare's comedies, the screwball ones usually have everything working out for the best, even though that seems like a bit of a stretch when viewed with more modern eyes.
I'm left thinking, though, that this movie didn't really age very well, and just gave good people bad ideas about how much fun it is to be dead and mess with the living when you become a ghost.
Also starring Constance Bennett, Cary Grant (last seen in "Destination Tokyo"), Roland Young (last seen in "The Philadelphia Story"), Billie Burke (last seen in "The Barkleys of Broadway"), Alan Mowbray (last seen in "Terror by Night"), Eugene Pallette (last seen in "The Adventures of Robin Hood"), Arthur Lake, Virginia Sale (last seen in "The Thin Man Goes Home"), Elaine Shepard, Theodore von Eltz, J. Farrell MacDonald, and cameos from Ward Bond (last seen in "You Can't Take It with You"), Hoagy Carmichael (last seen in "The Best Years of Our Lives"), Doodles Weaver (last seen in "Another Thin Man").
RATING: 5 out of 10 pink ladies
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