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.
Synopsis: A harmless séance at a novelist's home summons the ghost of his glamorous first wife.