Almost seven years ago, writing in the Bright Lights Film Journal, in a piece rather enigmatically entitled “We’ll Roll in the Hey Nonny Nonny!” Antic Antiques to Keep a Drowsy Emperor Awake, if He’s Not Too Sleepy, I wrote about first my fascination and then my frustration with the 1945 film version of Noël Coward’s famous play, Blithe Spirit, directed by David Lean.
A decade or so after I saw Brief Encounter [in the late 1970s, finding it to be totally square], I came across a TV listing for Blithe Spirit—a married, middle-aged novelist is visited by the ghost of his first wife. Hmmm. Possible gay subtext? A chance to see the “real” Noël Coward? With Margaret Rutherford as the medium Madame Arcati? How could it miss? I decided to check it out, and the film started out precisely the way I expected — Charles and Ruth (Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings), a well-appointed, self-satisfied couple, their marriage far, as Ruth says, from a “fine, careless rapture,” chatting briefly about Charles’ first wife, Elvira, now deceased, rather “ethereal,” as Charles says. Charles is a mystery writer, planning a novel about a medium, and to do “research” he’s invited the Madame over for an evening of table knocking. It’s all rubbish, of course, but it will play well.
Naturally, Elvira (Kay Hammond) shows up, but after that the film just sits there, and then slowly falls apart. Elvira, both as written and as played by Hammond, doesn’t seem to be ethereal or “blithe” at all. Instead, she’s petty, pouty, and just a bit slutty, considerably less attractive than Ruth, who comes across as witty, self-possessed, and shrewd. And there’s not a drop of subtext — gay or otherwise — at least none that I could find. Elvira doesn’t “awaken” Charles to all the compromises he’s made to achieve success — Coward liked success too much to make fun of it. Instead, he goes for the easy laughs — Charles struggling to talk to two people at once, one of them invisible, and naturally making a hash of it over and over again — and none of it very funny. For the finale, which to my mind was no finale at all, everyone gets killed and turns into a ghost! So what!
So what indeed! And no wonder that Sir Noël allegedly told Lean “You fucked up the best thing I eve did!” But last year, an extravagant new film version of Blithe Spirit appeared, directed by Edward Hall, available via Amazon Plus, and just a couple of weeks ago über film buff C. Jerry Kutner pointed me towards the 1956 TV special posted above, directed by and starring Sir Noël himself, with Claudette Colbert as Ruth and Lauren Bacall as Elvira, plus the little known (to me, at least) Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati, which popped up on Youtube just a couple of months ago. Well, not to keep you in suspense, 1956 is a delight, and 2020 is a disaster. So I’ll lead with the delight and dispense with the disaster after.
The 1956 Blithe Spirit is a time machine, taking you back to that now almost inconceivable era when it was taken for granted that all of civilization rested securely on the twin pillars of cigarettes and dry martinis.1 Blithe Spirit was broadcast in color, but the only recording medium then available, kinescope, was black and white only. Furthermore, the recording available on Youtube has plenty of distortion, which makes one wish/hope that a better version will someday emerge.
Because the 1956 version is about a hundred times better than what David Lean did with the play (and about a thousand times better than what Edward Hall did with it). Instead of a dead film, we have “great theater”, everything people went to the theater for back in the day—wit, charm, elegance, and, well, not a lot of depth. Because this Blithe Spirit, while it is “great theater”, is still not a great play.
As I explained/complained in my earlier review, not only of Blithe Spirit but of several other Coward plays—Hay Fever, Design for Living, We Were Dancing, Private Lives, and Present Laughter, Sir Noël simply didn’t do serious. The whole notion that Charles found “true happiness” with Elvira as opposed to Ruth, which is hinted at pretty strongly in the opening scene of the play, is simply dropped, though not quite as quickly in the 1956 version. In that version, when Madame Arcati is “setting the scene” for the first séance, she says that music always helps, snatching a record at random, which happens to be Irving Berlin’s “Always”. “Oh, not that one,” Charles exclaims, which “echoes” a theme/device that occurs in both Private Lives and We Were Dancing, that music can trick us into revealing our true feelings, which we generally seek to hide from prying eyes. But, again, as is so often the case in Coward, those true feelings go right back in the closet as soon as possible. So dangerous! So much safer to be shallow! No one ever drowns in the shallow end, do they? So that proves it!
Three fourths of the charm of the TV version is really supplied by Madame Arcati, whose role was sadly cut in the Lean version. As Coward wrote the play, so it would seem, the Madame, wide-eyed and earnest if generally incompetent, makes an excellent foil to the upper class sophisticates, who snicker at her “public school” spirit,2 which ultimately achieves the goal, desired of everyone, of sending Elvira “back”. This does not happen in the film version, which ends with Elvira, Ruth, and Charles all dead and stuck with each other for, as far as we can tell, all eternity, very close to the conclusion of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play Huis Clos (“No Exit”)—“Hell is other people”—though Lean would have had to be moving awfully fast to incorporate the reference, which, one suspects, Coward scarcely would have wanted if he had understood it.
The televised version, which I guess is what Coward did want, has both Elvira and Ruth (killed by Elvira by this time, though she was aiming at Charles) being “sent back”, to wherever that is, and whatever it entails, rather to Charles’ pleasure, and the women seem “comfortable” with it as well, though it isn’t clear why.3 When one’s lovers, past and present, start bickering, after all, isn’t it much easier to send them all packing and simply start over? Once a row starts, no matter who starts it, things get said that can’t be unsaid and resentments fester. One even finds oneself becoming unpleasant. They drag you down to their level, which is most unpleasant indeed! Better to have done with the whole lot and move on to fresh fields!4 That's the sensible thing to do!
Well, it is all very sensible, but, speaking theatrically, there are few things flatter than a “sensible” denouement. For what is “theater” for other than to escape the dreadful rule of common sense and compromise? But for Coward, living at a time when the only alternative to the closet was, almost literally, death, it was perhaps the best that could be hoped for.
Well, today is different, right? You can do anything you damn please. Which, unfortunately, can lead to disaster, as it did in 2020. The “new” Bltihe Spirit is often visually stunning, which makes the waste of talent and resources all the more irritating. I would lay 90% of the blame on director Hall and the writers, Nick Moorcroft, Meg Leonard, and Piers Ashworth, who proceed to fuck up the best thing Sir Noël ever did even more than David Lean managed to do, leaving both the characters and the “plot” (I use the term loosely) so riddled with inconsistencies that it’s impossible to care about Charles, Ruth, and Elvira as people or ghosts. The film ends with a pseudo-woke twist, as Ruth and Elvira, both ethereal now, depart for the hereafter in the manner of a 1930s edition of Thelma and Louise, after having exposed Charles to ridicule and shame by revealing that Elvira wrote all his books, a woke twist severely compromised by the fact that the production finds room for only one black actor in the entire cast, and doesn’t even bother to give the poor fellow a single line!
And, after having sat through three productions, I still have to say, where’s my damn gay subtext? Doesn’t anyone care about these things? Maybe someday someone will write the play Sir Noël should have written. But it sure doesn’t seem like that will be anytime soon.
1. Back in the fifties, there were surely a thousand articles, published in magazines like the Atlantic and the Esquire, giving the recipe for the “perfect” dry martini, which were almost always made with gin and vermouth in those days, rather than vodka, giving little room for variation. The idea was to have as little vermouth as possible, so that the vast majority of these recipes were simply facetious (allegedly) variations on a theme—“use an eyedropper”, “rinse out the glasses”, etc.
2. “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” was a once much quoted, and then much ridiculed, line from an emblematic poem of British imperialism, “Vitï Lampada” (“The Torch of Life”), by Sir Henry John Newbolt, written in 1892. Why a “Madame Arcati” would be so squarely “British” is another matter.
3. One suspects that Ruth and Elvira are both down with leaving because Sir Noël wanted the play to end and didn’t want to go to the trouble of developing a conclusion that is actually “dramatic”. (The 1956 version ends with the two “departed” invisible but still present, trashing Charles’ living room while he isn’t present. Yet it was somehow “clear” to me that this was only a farewell gesture on their part. Why that was “clear” I don’t know.)
4. Charles seems much more comfortable with Ruth than with Elvira, who, once she actually arrives, seems more petulant than ethereal, always insisting on Charles’ complete attention, while Ruth is both less demanding and more supportive. Yet when Ruth is gone, Charles doesn’t seem to miss her that much either. What’s done is done, after all. No use crying over spilt milk.
