Notes on…

Blithe Spirit(1945)

Dir. Directed by David Lean


Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit [may] be defined as a very British sort of resistance literature, encouraging resistance to encroaching catastrophe by blithely ignoring it.

[…]

Everything about Lean’s film makes Coward’s material heavier and more palpable. We have Coward’s comedy, but we have it as if under glass, available for analysis in a way that a play in performance never is. Lean does not push things toward buoyancy or whimsicality, but the suggestion of straight-ahead seriousness in his direction makes things funnier than any hint of high-comic exaggeration could have done.

Geoffrey O'Brien (Criterion)


When you’re on a comedy like Blithe Spirit, it is awfully hard working for a director who has no sense of humor.

Rex Harrison

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Synopsis: An English mystery novelist invites a medium to his home, so she may conduct a séance for a small gathering. The writer hopes to gather enough material for the book he's working on, as well as to expose the medium as a charlatan. However, proceedings take an unexpected turn, resulting in a chain of supernatural events being set into motion that wreak havoc on the man's present marriage.