BLITHE SPIRIT (1945)

The release of the spooky comedy Blithe Spirit in May 1945 was a meeting of two grand and formidable minds, consciously crafted reputations strong enough to label them respectively in the industry as ‘The Master’ and ‘The King’: playwright and bon viveur Noel Coward and rising star actor Rex Harrison.

Noel Coward (1889-1973) was born into what he called ‘genteel poverty’ in south-west London and was able to transform himself by careful image projection from a humble child actor with an ambitious mother into the epitome of upper middle-class sophistication. This shrewd self-invention may have given him the crucial slight distancing of a relative outsider that enabled him to acidly and affectionately satirise high society with stunning success. By the age of just 26, he already had four West End hits running at the same time including the scandalous family nymphomania and drugs drama The Vortex. Coward also ensured the cementing of an idealised self as his ‘brand’ (long before social media made it commonplace among anyone even tangentially linked to show business). He did this by writing himself the lead role in many of his plays, thus cannily keeping himself employed and controlling the narrative of how he was perceived.

By the time World War Two broke out, Coward had amassed a staggering body of work encompassing 32 plays and 150 songs - even more impressive from a self-taught creative who could neither write nor read music. Amidst the light stage comedies and irresistible ditties such as Mad Dogs and Englishmen, he did not shirk from addressing the harsh realities of wartime strife. Asking Prime Minister Winston Churchill what he could do for the war effort, he was requested to entertain the troops. On the one hand this was provided by topical crowd-pleasing songs like the cheekily baiting Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to The Germans and more soberly by his writing and producing the fine and moving films In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1944) partnering with director David Lean.

Coward dashed off the play of Blithe Spirit over five or six days from the safety of a seaside hotel during the Blitz. Its whimsical treatment of the afterlife as a source for henpecking mirth amongst other things was daring for the time, and yet it created a charmingly British form of resistance. Optimistic escapism was as important to beleaguered audiences as facing their unavoidable everyday traumas. Noel Coward showed he could honour both needs.

He didn’t feel as well supported in return though by Hollywood when it came to translating his theatre triumphs to the screen. The film version of Private Lives in 1931 was judged a weak reinterpretation, and despite the greater success of Design for Living (1933) under comedy maestro Ernst Lubitsch, it fared no better in Coward’s nor the critics’ eyes for having changed most of the original play. This time the playwright felt he could only entrust Blithe Spirit to David Lean with whom he had the two aforementioned movie successes. This would however generate mixed results.

The main character Charles Condomine was a familiar Coward role model, a self-regarding aesthete, the ‘hag-ridden’ centre of a whirlwind of partially spectral female forces against whom he gets to fire off reactive, waspish bon-mots whilst fending off plenty of theirs. As conventionally chauvinistic as Coward was, his ladies as written gave as good as they got in the one-liner department. When it came to fashioning the movie version, there was only one gentleman other than the Master himself who could inhabit Condomine’s qualities.

Much like Noel Coward, Rex Harrison (1908–1990) was essentially a self-made man. Although he too came from middle-class respectability, he also had to work hard - not only to create a determinedly debonair persona a world away from his unrefined background, but to overcome professional limitations. Unlike his theatre contemporaries such as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, Harrison received no formal acting training at all. This partly explains his life-long aversion to Shakespeare (though he became a great exponent of Shaw). What seemed an effortless technique and facility for high comedy that eventually made his name was sculpted the hard way, through the on-the-job slog of touring repertory theatres around the country.

Harrison began his stage apprenticeship in the 1920s on typically low beginner’s wages and parts yet he already began affecting a toff’s dress code, at one point sporting a monocle on and off-stage that his fellow actors mocked as too pretentious even back then. Harrison cared not a jot. He was forging a hard shell of self-will that gave him precision and discipline yet was coupled with enough unfeeling egotism to earn him a bad personal reputation for the rest of his life. Alexander Walker’s biography of him, Fatal Charm, outlines the potential role model perils awaiting an impressionable young man. He acquired finesse from his idol Gerald du Maurier, but gained an education in diva tendencies from leading lady Marie Tempest. Not for nothing or with fondness did his haughty regality earn him the industry nickname of ‘The King’.

Nevertheless, Harrison’s acidic demeanour, long established before My Fair Lady’s global blockbuster, was a marketable type in a profession that celebrates and encourages bad behaviour as long as it’s lucrative. Coward would have been well aware of his established stage persona. He needed as sure-fire a leading man as possible to do justice to his biggest stage hit which ran for almost 2000 performances and didn’t close until the year after the film came out. Although the role of Condomine fit Harrison like a glove, it was one that actually pinched interminably for him during filming. He didn’t appreciate wearing a garment so precisely tailored to its author’s measurements; there was no wiggle room for him to personalise the part with his own choices.

The other issue was the choice of director. David Lean was well on his way to the future epic visionary behind Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago - but he was not a man to bring the funny. Many years later Harrison acknowledged the difficulty of having the wrong sensibility in charge here: “It is awfully hard working for a director with no sense of humour”.

Blithe Spirit is a frivolous piece in style as well as content, filmed in magical Technicolor by cinematographer and later director Ronald Neame. Lean however wanted to ground it in an earthbound reality. On stage it is a fun sustained battle of the sexes between Condomine the leisurely mystery writer angling for a quiet life, his disciplined bossy second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings) and the sudden intervention of his deceased, much-loved first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond) summoned up by the seemingly dubious medium Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford).

Lean opens up the play beyond the four walls of the stage original, for example by separating Ruth’s sceptical carpings over Charles’s spook sighting (he’s the only one who can see Elvira) over a whole day of changing locations. This gives a sense of realism yet it breaks the flow of suspending the audience’s own disbelief.  Twice Lean directs our point-of-view to be switched to Ruth so that her incredulity at Charles apparently talking to himself can be appreciated.

When Harrison is allowed his head of steam he is very enjoyable to watch, savouring each snarky remark he can aim at the women encircling him. He has his work cut out though and is often reduced to being a bystander, observing the female-driven proceedings around him like a wincing Cheshire cat continually denied a snooze in the sun. Margaret Rutherford eclipses him as a bracing force of unpredictable nature whom you can’t take your eyes off whenever she is on screen, whether flamboyantly dancing about in a pre-séance warm-up or delivering pearls of priceless Coward-isms – “I never touch Indian. It upsets my vibrations”.

Cummings is a resolute and lovely no-nonsense foil, not only to Charles’ snide sexism but in contrast to Hammond’s lush and impulsive Elvira. Hammond actually came in for unflattering physical criticism during shooting which seems unwarranted on the evidence of her appeal here. Neame, who went on to manfully cope with the special-effects vessel of The Poseidon Adventure (1972) failed to see her allure through his viewfinder. “What’s this bloke doing wasting his time with the other harpy when he’s got this bit waiting for him upstairs in bed?” he said on set whilst struggling to light her satisfactorily. For me, she is adorable in the part, possessing the kind of maddeningly elusive charm that credibly establishes her as Charles’ greatest love. Green-tinged all over in a flowing gown matched to hair and skin, offset with scarlet lips and nails, she oozes a wicked, mocking sexuality. Her voice is also unconventionally attractive: suggestive and with an almost lazy drawl that seduces like a soft cushion. “The way that woman harps on bed” she teases Ruth in absentia for Charles’ ears only.

This is not to say Elvira is an unimpeachable angel. She can be downright merciless, beyond simply disapproving of Ruth’s taste and buttoned-up temperament. A possible flaw in Coward’s writing is the unjustifiable cruelty with which she flaunts affairs she had such as with Captain Bracegirdle whilst alive. The only advantage this gives is a sneaky chauvinist one to bring the audience onside with Charles whenever he responds in similar tone.

To be fair, Lean made one important change to the play’s ending for the film that may have benefitted it sympathy-wise. The stage version closes with Charles defiantly addressing the unseen, now dual phantom pests of Elvira and Ruth (who dies in the car Elvira had tinkered with in order to be reunited with Charles post-mortem). Leaving aside how a transparent Elvira is able to affect earthbound mechanics, he somewhat heartlessly crows “I’m going to enjoy myself as I’ve never enjoyed myself before!” The movie closure goes a stage further by Elvira literally engineering his demise as well so that post-crash he joins the ladies sitting on a wall in green-tinted resignation. If Lean had applied the same whimsy to the piece as a whole, Blithe Spirit may well have been a more sparkling gem.

In his war-years autobiography Future Indefinite Coward dismissed the film with the elegant: “I will draw a light, spangled veil over Blithe Spirit which they made while I was away in South Africa. It wasn’t entirely bad, but it was a great deal less good than it should have been”. He was more blunt at the time according to Geoffrey O’Brien’s Criterion DVD edition notes, telling Lean after seeing a rough-cut: “My dear, you’ve just fucked up the best thing I ever wrote”.  

For Coward, Harrison and Lean, Blithe Spirit could be regarded as an entertaining little leg-stretching stroll during an otherwise unstoppable climb to greater fame and fortune.