Topper Returns (Hal Roach Productions, United Artists, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Dying to Be a Cheerleader I had originally intended to stay on Lifetime for the next film in their “Fear the Cheer” theme weekend, but after the first scene I realized I’d seen it before and decided to spare Charles the ordeal of watching two Lifetime movies in a row. Instead I looked through the DVD backlog and found Topper Returns, third and last of a three-film series Hal Roach produced from 1937 to 1941. The original Topper was based on a ghost novel by Thorne Smith (who also wrote Turnabout, also filmed by Hal Roach, in which a man and a woman switch bodies: an obvious precursor to the 1984 film All of Me, with Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin in the parts in which Roach had cast John Hubbard and Carole Landis) and featured Constance Bennett and Cary Grant as a couple of irresponsible young and party-hearty one-percenters who crash their fancy car and die, but for some reason survive as ghosts and haunt staid, boring banker Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) and his ditzy wife Clara (Billie Burke -- noting her most famous credit, as Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, I joked, “She hasn’t been the same since they repossessed her bubble”) to liven up their lives.

There was a surprisingly dull sequel a year later called Topper Takes a Trip, in which Bennett, Young and Burke reprised their roles but, alas, Cary Grant didn’t -- and then this one from 1941 in which the ghost is Gail Richards (Joan Blondell, now out of the Warners complex but still playing her voice-of-reason character), who’s on a trip with her friend Ann Carrington (Carole Landis, whom both Roach and, later, 20th Century-Fox had big hopes for but who had a messy personal life: she went through three husbands and was divorcing her fourth when she died; she also had an affair with Rex Harrison and supposedly killed herself when he went back to his wife, thereby making his name mud in Hollywood until his enormous success in My Fair Lady on Broadway in 1956 revitalized his career) when an unseen sniper (we see the gun, not the shooter) shoots out a tire on the taxi taking Ann and Gail to Ann’s ancestral mansion to see her father John Carrington (H. B. Warner) at long last. It seems that though they were both Americans they met in Singapore, and dad wanted to return home while mom was so enamored of Asian culture she decided to stay there while she was still pregnant with Ann, ultimately settling in Shanghai and raising Ann there.

The Carrington fortune was made from a tungsten mine in China John Carrington owned and ran with a partner, Hastings, until Hastings was killed in an accident at the mine, Carrington took over and ultimately settled on the New England coast somewhere (the writers -- pulp mystery scribe Jonathan Latimer, future director Gordon Douglas and “additional dialogue” writer Paul Edward Smith -- aren’t all that specific about the film’s geography, but the Carrington house is at the edge of a big bluff and there’s a long way down the cliffs to the shore below, not that that becomes much of a plot issue) and is looking forward to seeing the daughter he knows about and has received letters from but has never met. His doctor, Jeris (George Zucco, marvelous as usual), warns him not to get too excited and doesn’t seem to be up to any good. Though Ann and Gail both survived the sniper attack on the road, Gail is killed by a mysterious-looking man in a black cloak, a black hat and a face-covering mask (today he’d be right in style!) but she gets to turn into a ghost so she can hang around long enough to protect Ann and find who’s after her for the Carrington fortune -- since before they went to bed for the last time Ann and Gail had switched rooms. It seems that John Carrington had designated the “Chinese suite” for her because she’d grown up there, but Ann wanted nothing more to do with anything from China and so she and Gail switched rooms, thereby getting killed by an assassin who was really targeting Ann.

What’s amazing about Topper Returns -- which I thought was the funniest of the three when I saw them all in rapid succession in the 1980’s -- is that the writers are able to balance mystery, horror and comedy impeccably, enough that I’m considering adding Topper Returns to my short list of the greatest horror-comedies ever made (The Bride of Frankenstein, the Bob Hope vehicle Ghost Breakers, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the original Ghostbusters). Part of the film’s success is due to the excellent supporting cast, including Raffaela Ottiano as the Carringtons’ racially ambiguous housekeeper (think a fusion of Judith Anderson in Rebecca and Gale Sondergaard in The Letter and you’ve got her); Patsy Kelly as Topper’s maid (her voice-of-reason characterization is an asset to just about every film she made) and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson as Topper’s chauffeur.

Anderson was that rarity in 1930’s movies, a Black comic-relief character who played a servant who is still funny -- all too often the Black servant characters got tagged with horrible names like “Stepin Fetchit,” “G. Howe Black” or “Sleep ‘n’ Eat” (“Sleep ‘n’ Eat” was really Willie Best, and Bob Hope -- who was anti-racist when anti-racism wasn’t cool -- lobbied producers to bill him under his real name but was not able to get him better roles). Anderson and Mantan Moreland were somehow able to tweak the disgusting dumb-Black servant stereotype and play streetwise instead of stupid. It helped that Anderson’s regular gig was on Jack Benny’s radio show, and Benny was famous for letting all his sidekicks score off him; there’s even a reference to that when Anderson is packing to leave the Carrington mansion and says, “I’m going back to Mr. Benny; he never put me through anything like this!”

Along the way Anderson discovers a trick chair in the Carringtons’ living room which plunges whoever sits in it down a long vertical tunnel into the ocean below -- for some reason the house is built on top of at least one mining tunnel and an underground pool that leads to the open ocean, where a crew of three waits to take Gail Richards’ body on a rowboat to a small ship in the open sea -- and later the cab driver who we saw in the opening scene reappears because he’s taken a shine to Ann Carrington and also wants to protect her from whoever wants to kill her for the Carrington inheritance. Along the way most of the dramatis personae are locked into a walk-in freezer in the Carringtons’ kitchen -- ironically Billie Burke complains the loudest even though out of all of them she’s dressed the warmest (in a big fur coat that in 1941 made people think of luxury and ostentation, and now makes people think of cruelty to animals) -- and two of the crew members on that little ship get into a fight because each one thinks the other is turning off the engine. (It’s actually Gail’s ghost, who unlike most movie ghosts can appear at will to anyone or turn herself invisible, and can also manipulate objects -- there’s a nice scene reminiscent of the Invisible Man movies in which she smokes a cigarette while invisible so the cigarette appears to be smoking itself in mid-air.) This scene is about the closest this movie ever gets to the rough-hewn slapstick that had been Hal Roach’s stock in trade before he decided to use the profits from the Laurel and Hardy movies to make a run at big-time productions as well as big-time stars.

The mystery finally gets resolved when the cab driver, played by a very young Dennis O’Keefe, finds the chain inside the fireplace that sets off the booby trap on that chair, and he figures he can get Gail’s killer to confess by tricking him into sitting in the chair and then getting up when he sees O’Keefe’s character reach out for the control. The killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] John Carrington himself -- or rather Hastings, since he killed John Carrington back in China, took over his half of the mining fortune, used it to establish himself in the U.S. and is determined to kill Ann Carrington so there’ll be no one left with a legal claim to the money. Obviously this was going to be a real surprise to the 1941 audience, not only because H. B. Warner has played him with such a gentle, loving mien but because by far his most famous credit, then or now, was as Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 King of Kings. (Also the masked, hooded, caped killer looked too big and too robust to be the short, skinny H. B. Warner, though maybe there was a co-conspirator.) There’s another twist to the ending in which Carrington is attempting to flee in his big car, Topper’s car is chasing him with no one visibly at the wheel (Gail’s ghost is driving) and Carrington’s car goes off the road, killing him and turning him into Gail’s unwelcome ghost companion “until I can get this sorted out, I go to heaven and you go to … that other place.”

Topper Returns is a really nice movie, fun in ways that aren’t always the expected ones and an odd outlier in the history of American cinema, an unpretentious mixture of comedy, horror (the Carrington mansion looks like, and may very well have been, a borrowed set from Universal’s horror films), mystery and drama that holds up marvelously well, a kind of filmmaking the studio system was good at -- the director was Roy Del Ruth, who had a decades-long career making all sorts of movies including the first (and surprisingly good, though not a patch on John Huston’s classic) The Maltese Falcon in 1931 -- that by now has become virtually a lost art.