Blithe Spirit (1945)

Directed by David Lean. Starring Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford, Constance Cummings, Kay Hammond, Hugh Wakefield, Joyce Carey, Jacqueline Clarke.

Weakest of the four David Lean-Noël Coward collaborations, even though it’s based on the piece that Coward once described as the best play he ever wrote. The ending was changed and some of the action was moved to exteriors and alternate locations, but it mostly just looks like a photographed stage play set in the home of English writer Charles Condomime (Harrison). He invites an eccentric medium (scene-stealer Rutherford) to conduct a séance as research for a book he’s working on, little imagining that the ritual would summon the spirit of Charles’ deceased first wife (Hammond), and that she’d then stick around to bother the living. Smooth banter and an agreeably befuddled Harrison compensate for creaky qualities elsewhere, like Hammond’s vexing voice and the dated efforts to visualize the apparitions (garbed and made-up in fluorescent green, they look more like broccoli stalks than ghosts). Technicolor photography by Ronald Neame, who also co-scripted the adaptation. Coward provides an uncredited bit of narration.

65/100