Blithe Spirit (1945)

You know, I never really liked Blithe Spirit on the page, maybe because I thought the ending really wasn't that funny, even if the first act of the play is hilarious. Well, I quite honestly laughed my ass off watching Rex Harrison, Margaret Rutherford, and the rest of the cast of the 1945 David Lean–Ronald Neame–Noel Coward film of this play. It's delightful!

I've been watching films from the 1947 awards season, and I'd been postponing this one, but the Queer Cinema Archive posted about this recently as a bit of queer coding – the implication is that Margaret Rutherford's Madame Arcati character is coded as a lesbian – so I figured I'd catch Blithe Spirit tonight. Well, I've watched the film now, and I can't say I saw any such coding. However, a the end of the film there is some explicit queerness:

Elvira, the main character’s late wife, has been pestering him about her flirtations with a Captain Bracegirdle while she was alive. She had, apparently, been unfaithful to her husband with old Captain Bracegirdle, whom she tells us was very attractive. Well, at the very end of the movie, Rex Harrison has a monologue about how he’s always been picked on by women who have bossed him around. Harridans, he calls them. Then he says, “You were very silly, Elvira, if you think I didn’t know all about you and Captain Bracegirdle. I did. And what you didn’t realize is that I was extremely attached to Paul Westlake at the time!”

Incidentally, the poster, which is very sexy, doesn't have a thing to do with the movie, which isn't remotely sexy. Kay Hammond, the eponymous blithe spirit, doesn't wear anything approximating the sexy outfit of the woman on the poster, and her haircut looks nothing like this either. Honestly, I don't know who this is even supposed to be. In any case, although it is not at all sexy, Blithe Spirit is a very funny film, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

The Scoundrel (1935)

The Scoundrel is an old movie, so I suppose it deserves a little mercy, but I'm not feeling very forgiving of this Ben Hecht–Charled MacArthur film. The thing is, The Scoundrel just doesn't work. Noel Coward, who should be perfectly right for this part, doesn't make the role zip the way it ought to. The script clearly sparkles, but Coward's delivery is all misery all the time. One can't understand why anyone would ever be charmed by him, and the whole point is that this scoundrel is supposed to be charming!

And then there is the premise, which is promising but turns out to be moralistic and strange. A scoundrel, cad, what have you, is a jerk to a woman who loves him, is almost killed, but is saved by a god and required to return to earth to find someone who will shed tears for him? 

 So it's Der Fliegende Holländer set in 1930s New York, but The Scoundrel takes a moral tone that can't help but ring hollow. Furthermore, the whole thing would have been more enjoyable if the scoundrel's actual bad behavior contained any fun. Unfortunately even the scoundrel's scandals are joyless in this movie.