| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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TOPPER
Rating: 
USA. 1937.
Director – Norman Z. McLeod, Screenplay – Eric Hatch, Jack Jevine & Eddie Moran, Based on the Novel by Thorne Smith, Producer – Hal Roach, Photography (b&w) – Norbert Brodine, Musical Director – Marvin Hartley, Musical Arrangements – Arthur Marton, Photographic Effects – Roy Seawright, Art Direction – Arthur I. Royce. Production Company – MGM.
Cast:
Roland Young (Cosmo Topper), Constance Bennett (Marion Kerby), Cary Grant (George Kerby), Billie Burke (Clara Topper), Alan Mowbray (Wilkins), Arthur Lake (Elevator Operator), Eugene Pallette (Casey), Virginia Sale (Miss Johnson)
Plot: Wealthy socialites George and Marion Kerby are killed when they crash in their speedster. Afterwards Cosmo Topper, the manager of the bank where they are boardroom executives, buys the speedster and has it reconditioned. But while driving in the car, he crashes on the same stretch of road that they did and there the ghosts of George and Marion appear to him. They believe they have been sent back to help Topper make his life less staid. Joining him, sometimes invisible and sometimes not, they proceed to cause utter havoc all around him with their carefree ways.
Topper was one of the very first films amid the 1940s mini-genre of light eschatological fantasies. It had been preceded by The Ghost Goes West (1936) but it was the success of Topper that kicked the genre into high gear. Topper inspired a whole host of similar such screwball comedy fantasies circling around ghost, heavenly and afterlife themes. Others included the likes of Turnabout (1940), The Horn Blows at Midnight (1942) I Married a Witch (1943) and The Canterville Ghost (1944). Later entries in this genre such as Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941), A Guy Named Joe (1943), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), A Matter of Life and Death/Stairway to Heaven (1946), The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) and Portrait of Jennie (1948) became increasingly more serious in their treatment of themes. The line where the light eschatological fantasy moves between screwball comedy and serious can almost be drawn at the outbreak of World War II. When casualties started becoming a very real thing, the afterlife fantasy started to turn away from frivolous entertainment towards ameliorating fantasies of comfort and the assurance of a grand reuniting awaiting all good people in the afterlife.
So from the time when the afterlife fantasy didn’t take itself seriously at all, Topper comes with a sublime screwball silliness. The opening scenes with Cary Grant driving with his feet up on the wheel of the car; he and Constance Bennett turning up at the nightclub and sliding down slides and singing all night long; spending the night asleep in their gorgeous custom speedster on the street outside the bank as a crowd gathers, waiting for the boardroom meeting to open; and Cary Grant throwing the whole meeting into chaos with his refusal to take matters seriously and his punning plays on “no cents” and “no sense” are quite delightful. There’s a giddily delirious frothiness to Topper. You can almost sense the film having been construed in a spirit of dizzily manic euphoria in a determination to throw off the social gloom of The Depression and celebrate people taking nothing at all, not even death, seriously. And Topper is really nothing less than a series of wonderful gonzo scenes. There’s an hysterical sequence with Roland Young being followed around the lobby of a hotel by Cary Grant invisibly pushing a chair and insisting he sit down, which is aided by Young’s perfect dull, deadpan timing – “I’m having a little chair trouble. Please ignore me,” he apologizes to the other guests.
Roland Young gives a wonderfully droll and perfectly dull performance as Topper. Young has a perfect sense of deadpan timing. He has really been set up as a figure of boring conservatism whose character arc is a move from dreariness to enjoyment of life. That really is the whole of the film’s fantasy. There’s an undeniable mischievousness to the film as well – with it endorsing all manner of mildly risqué and anti-social behaviours, including pinching wives’ bottoms, characters getting drunk and getting into fights with cops, having affairs, and even the staid Roland Young being revealed to be hiding lingerie inside his coat while in court.
Topper was made before Cary Grant had become a major name and was the film in which Grant perfected his debonair, sophisticated screen persona. Here he is only second-billed below the now almost forgotten Constance Bennett. She gives an appealingly flirtatious performance. Both of them are admirably served by the sparklingly effervescent dialogue.
There were two sequels – Topper Takes a Trip (1939) and Topper Returns (1941). Roland Young appears as Topper in all three, Constance Bennett returns as Marion in the first. Cary Grant doesn’t return and the character of George was written out of both the sequels. The film was also later turned into a well-liked tv series Topper (1953-5) starring Anne Jeffreys and Robert Sterling as the ethereal couple and with Leo G. Carroll in the title role. This lasted for two seasons. The film was later remade as a tv pilot Topper (1979) starring Kate Jackson and Andrew Stevens as the ghostly husband and wife and Jack Warden as Topper, although this never went to series.
Thorne Smith was a popular novelist on light fantasy themes. There were a number of other films adapted from Thorne Smith’s books, including Night Life of the Gods (1935) wherein a magic ring brings a statue to life, the bodyswap comedy Turnabout (1940) and the utterly delightful I Married a Witch (1942).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2003
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