Madam has all of her help dress like this.
Blithe Spirit (1945) is a comparative rarity: a production with sophisticated dialog that works, disturbingly, on several levels, pushing such buttons as bullying, sarcasm, and alcoholism through British high society’s precocious predilection for stereotypical phrases that can be snapped off at a moment’s notice: Do you think so? Quite.
In this story of a novelist’s late wife coming back for a good haunting, the fun with language really takes off when, on her return, only he can see her; the current wife is the victim of thinking much of the dialog is directed at her and not the unseen first wife. This exposes the deadly content that is ordinarily insulated by expectation, the expectation that exaggeration is part of regular conversation, but when misdirected it can leave its unintended targets in tatters.
A marvelously gusto-filled medium who steals all of her scenes, a mousy maid, and every character quite filled with life (or something like it), if not quite believable, this is a fun little flick, excepting a final scene that was not part of the stage play on which the movie was based, but outside of that I thoroughly enjoyed it as a bit of light entertainment as I recover from a default-diagnosis of food poisoning.
