The pre-Oscar TCM movie festival continues so I decided to re-watch Topper.\u00a0 This is without a doubt one of the goofiest screwball comedies of the 1930s.\u00a0 Cary Grant and Constance Bennett are George and Marion Kirby, a young married couple.\u00a0 They\u2019re rich and they live a wild life.\u00a0 They stay up all night dancing and drinking and driving around in a crazy fin-backed whale of a roadster.\u00a0 Their banker is a middle-aged mouse of a man named Cosmo Topper.\u00a0 Topper has a proper wife who wants Topper to get up at 8am and go to bed by 11pm and have lamb on Sunday and steak on Tuesday and boiled vegetables on Wednesday.\u00a0 She expects him to be the respectable banker so she can be part of high society.<\/p>\n
When George and Marion show up at Topper\u2019s bank one morning for a business meeting you can tell that all three of them think that Topper\u2019s life is not much fun compared to the Kirbys.\u00a0 Driving back from the meeting George is characteristically driving like a madman around some hairpin turns when he gets something in his eye and crashes them.\u00a0 Staggering out of the wreck George and Marion gather their senses and realize that they have died in the crash and are now ghosts.\u00a0 Taking stock of the situation they realize they don\u2019t have any good deeds on their records to allow them to expect admission through the pearly gates.\u00a0 The scene dissolves with the ghosts themselves dissolving into invisibility.<\/p>\n
In the next scene Topper is at home with the missus.\u00a0 We witness the boredom of his respectable existence.\u00a0 At this point a mechanic shows up with the Kirby\u2019s repaired sports car.\u00a0 Both the mechanic and Mrs. Kirby remark on how mismatched this car would be for Topper.\u00a0 His pride is stung and he takes off with the car.\u00a0 The car gets the better of him and he crashes it at the same spot that the Kirbys crashed.\u00a0 The Kirbys make their presence known and Topper eventually gets over his fright.\u00a0 The rest of the film is the tale of the Kirbys trying to humanize Topper and make his life happier.\u00a0 This is the good deed that they hope will get them into heaven.<\/p>\n
With a plot this frothy everything depends on the characterizations of the stars.\u00a0 Cary Grant and Constance Bennett are at their witty best bantering together while teaching Topper to be a man and not a mouse.\u00a0 Roland Young brings his characteristic upper-class Englishman\u2019s mumbling confused manner to his portrayal of Cosmo Topper and Billie Burke as Mrs. Topper is the outraged prim and proper wife who needs to learn that a husband still needs to be a man.\u00a0 An uncredited part has Hoagy Carmichael playing the piano and singing for the happy couple.\u00a0 All in all, I\u2019d say this is a goofy comedy that from my point of view provides good entertainment.\u00a0 The story sails along and even the minor characters are well done and add to the fun of the story.<\/p>\n
I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The pre-Oscar TCM movie festival continues so I decided to re-watch Topper.\u00a0 This is without a doubt one of the goofiest screwball comedies of the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,238,237],"tags":[719,716,717,720,718],"class_list":["post-2181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-classic-movie-reviews","category-reviews","tag-billie-burke","tag-cary-grant","tag-constance-bennett","tag-hoagy-carmichael","tag-roland-young"],"yoast_head":"\n