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The Age of Commercialism

Good movie but grossly overrated

Did you people see the same film I saw?

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

Now that I've seen "Topper Takes a Trip", I have seen the three original Topper films. They are all mildly amusing, at best, but the shtick gets a little old after a while.In the original film, Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) is visited by two ghosts (Cary Grant and Constance Bennett). The film surprised the filmmakers, as it was a hit and folks were clamoring for more...but for some reason Cary Grant didn't agree to do the sequel. I can only assume he had better film projects and in hindsight I think he was probably wise to avoid this one. Instead, believe it or not, they replaced him with a ghost dog!! Uggh!This installment finds Cosmo fighting to stay married as Mrs. Topper (Billie Burke) is seeking a divorce. This really makes no sense, as she loved Topper...and her suddenly listening to bad friends who want to separate them is pretty awful and far from funny. Well, apparently American divorces take too long so she heads to Paris...and Cosmo goes there to try to stop her from doing this and marrying some Baron. Whatever. The bottom line is that this film seems to scream out "there is NO reason for this film"....and I would definitely agree. Not a terrible film...but not a good one. Oddly, the third film (starring Young, Burke and Joan Blondell as the ghost) is probably the best of the three movies.

The gimmick in this is a standard one: three worlds. The world of the ordinary people in the story. The world of the viewer. The world of spirits that directly manipulates and "stages" the folks in the film world, represented here by a beautiful blond in lux gowns. She's in between the other two. I'm interested in this because the 30's was a period of great experimentation in narrative, resulting in a few great results. One of these was noir, the unique invention of American film that has been profoundly interesting in movies, religion, dreams (which is much the same) and life. Noir is the notion of the viewer perturbing fate and influencing the characters' world, sometimes denoted by cinematic effects.See what we have here, a sort of predecessor. The previous "Topper" was quite strange, more of an exploration of sex than anything and one of the many post-code attempts at hinting sex and the importance of influential sex without showing it. This is altogether different though most of the jokes are the same, plus invisible dog jokes.Here, the ghost manipulates events, stages confrontations, shapes the story. A well shaped story is her "good deed: to be rewarded by God. See the connection? If you are interested in film, you must be of how noir changed the landscape. And then you will be noodling around in the thirties to see how it evolved (no intelligent design here). And you'll come to this.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

Not as good as the original, but still fun. Considering Cary Grant's limited (to scenes from the original) presence, they did a good job of pulling off the sequel.The review omitted a continuity goof. When Topper came around the same curve as the Kirbys and duplicated their bad luck with a flat tire, there was a 'let me back up and see that again' moment. Before the crash we could clearly see that the right rear tire was flat. When the car came to rest, the rear tire was fine and the right front tire was flat. But that just made watching the movie more fun. I didn't catch any other errors, but might on my next watching.

The Topper movies do not hold up well today for several reasons. Two are primary: Through no fault of their own, the gimmick of disappearing and reappearing has become very ho-hum in large part because of television shows like "I Dream Of Jeannie" and "Bewitched." ("Blithe Spirit" is another movie affected by this, also, of course, retroactively.) Equally significant is their reliance on the ostensible hilarity of being drunk. We know today that is not funny and finding these movies charming is therefore very difficult.This first sequel, also, is very routine. It begins with clips from the original Topper movie, with Constance Bennett (in this movie too) and Cary Grant, who is not in the movie itself.Many of the performers are great character performers but their characters are not filled out. They are sketched in. Billie Burke and Alan Mowbry are among those who suffer. Not to mention Franklin Pangborn, playing a desk clerk as he frequently did but here a desk clerk in Paris who speaks English with a (bad) French accent.The two standouts are D'Arcy as a baron who woos the Burke, who is separated from Roland Young (also a fine performer but just not funny in these movies.) The scene on the beach in which invisible Constance Bennett snatches away his bathing suit is about as close as the plot gets to genuine humor.Veree Teasdale, as Burke's tough society woman pal, walks away with the whole thing. She is extremely funny. Is her role a bit of stereotype? Yes. But the writers fleshed it out