I recently watched Blithe Spirit (2020) and was struck by how much of the Ghost Story genre is actually in this comedy. The film version diverges from the original play (I think in an attempt to give it a more modern spin). This aside, I was fascinated at how the supernatural scenes, taken from ghost stories of the past, could be spun around for comedic purposes.
Now first off, I have to acknowledge that Coward didn’t invent the funny ghost story. Writers like Jerome K. Jerome were doing this back before the beginning of the 20th Century. The Ghostbreaker (1909) was a popular ghost farce from before sound pictures. Perhaps most famous is Thorne Smith’s Topper (1926) in which a fussy banker has two lively ghosts spruce up his life. It received a famous film version starring Constance Bennett and Carey Grant in 1937. Blithe Spirit (1941) feels of the same ilk, though written as a play (here with Angela Landsbury as Madame Arcati) not a novel. It also had a film version in 1945 starring Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings. Margaret Rutherford played Madame Arcati in that one.
Some of the old ghost story material that stood out for me included two tales by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. “The Cold Embrace” (The Welcome Guest, Sept 29, 1860) and “Eveline’s Visitant” (Belgravia, January 1867) work both sides of the idea used in Blithe Spirit. In “The Cold Embrace” a German student falls in love with Gertrude but his career steers him away from her. She dies and returns to hold him in her cold arms. The student dies of this terrible love from the beyond. In “Eveline’s Visitant”, the wife of a man will become the slave of a terrible rival after she dies. As long as Eveline stays alive, she remains his wife but in death she has no power to fend off the dead suitor. Again, a horrific power struggle with a sad ending. Both of these themes can be seen in Blithe Spirit.
In the 2020 film version, Charles Condomine has the ghost of his first wife, Elvera, haunt him as he is trying to write a screenplay for his father-in-law. Unfortunately, Elvera wrote all his successful Murder Mystery novels. Charles needs her to write this movie as well. As in “The Cold Embrace” he can’t shake her, both emotionally or financially. When Elvera gets all poltergeisty we laugh at least until she tries to drop a china cabinet on him.
In the second half, Elvera is trying to kill Charles so she can have him back in the ghost world. Now the focus switches to his second wife, Ruth, who like the husband in “Eveline’s Visitant” must keep him alive so that she won’t lose him. Again, played for laughs but if drawn differently we might find Charles’ plight frightening. His predicament sends him to the madhouse after trying to do damage with a crochet mallet. There is mention of electro-shock therapy but Elvera breaks him out.
Add to the mix, Judy Dench as Madame Arcati, a poor man’s version of Madame Blavatsky. She mostly reminds me of Miss Bartendale from The Undying Monster (1922) by Jessie Douglas Kerruish. She is a mostly fake medium who accidentally brings Elvera back from the dead, then Ruth. The two wives gang up and ruin Charles’s career then kill him. The play and the 1945 version don’t have this ending, but the film producers obviously wanted to make a strong feminist statement. Considering the modern interpretations of Bradden’s work, this is perfectly appropriate.
These are strong Gothic ideas: the past coming to haunt those in the present. How does Noel Coward use them for humor? First off, none of the ghost’s actions are truly horrific until Elvera ruins the brakes on the car, resulting in Ruth’s death. She meant to kill Charles but Ruth ends up dead instead. The film version has a cartoony car going over the Cliffs of Dover into the sea. So presentation is quite important. Take for example a man trying to wrestle with an invisible enemy. This could be quite scary if done well, say by a Conan Doyle or hinted at by M. R. James. When we see Charles doing it during a garden party the results are supposedly funny. The knives that flew a the cook pin her chef’s hat to the cupboard. Could be scary in Stephen King’s hands but here it makes us laugh as does Ruth running after the cook, begging her to stay.
One more: the character of Madame Arcati plays this two-edge device as well. We see she is not entirely a fraud, visiting her home which looks like a witch’s hut with arcane materials everywhere. She is pathetic (in the lovable sense) since we know she lost her lover long ago and wishes only to see him again. We laugh when she falls from her rigging during a fake mediumistic performance in front of eight hundred people. And then she manages to bring Elvera back during the seance. She flips and flops from incompetent and able magic worker. This is good for humor, of course, but it also keeps her from becoming a truly horrific witch figure.
Some other classic bits include a seance with table tapping, Elvera spinning a tarot deck around Madame Arcati’s head, as well as throwing knives at the cook to scare her away. As a writer I had to laugh when Charles threw his typewriter through a window, taking off the head of a statue of Comus. (We have all been there! Imagine throwing one of those old typewriters! They weighed a thousand pounds.)
Some background details I enjoyed in the film were the appearance of Harry Price, the famous psychic researcher (played by James Fleet), Alfred Hitchcock (played by Peter A. Rogers) directing an early film at Pinewood Studios, as well as mention of Harry Houdini. In this respect I liked the film a lot. In bed, Ruth reads a giant copy of Modern Woman. I would have made it a copy of Ranch Romances or some other romantic Pulp. A copy of Weird Tales just wouldn’t have made sense. She was slick-reading type of gal anyway.
My last thought goes back to what I said earlier: These are strong Gothic ideas…One of the classic Gothic tropes is the woman who marries a man with a secret. That secret is the first wife, who has either been murdered or locked away in an asylum. The frightened young thing runs around creepy hallways or in dank dungeons in her negligee until all is revealed. (Ruth plays this part but she is not the shrinking violet.) There are no ghosts in Wuthering Heights or Rebecca or the grocery paperback, The Lonely Lord of Love’s Lost Manor. I don’t know how much Coward was aware of any of these classic elements. Did he read Ann Radcliffe? Or Mary E. Braddon? Or even Ghost Tales? I suppose it doesn’t really matter as Coward is about humor first. As with the Abbott & Costello films of the 1940s, creators after World War I began poking fun at the Victorian (and earlier) ghostly traditions. Blithe Spirit was part of that transition towards funny ghosts that will see Casper the Friendly Ghost and Scooby-Doo.
