Check Out the Trailer

The story behind this film has been done numerous times. Marion and George Kerby (Constance Bennett, 1934’s MOULIN ROUGE & Cary Grant, THE PHILADELPHIA STORY) are carefree socialites that paint the town red on a nightly basis. Cosmo Topper (Roland Young, KING SOLOMON’S MINE) is a banker who wishes that his extremely conservative wife Clara (Billie Burke, THE WIZARD OF OZ) would let him live a little.

George is on the board at Topper’s bank and Marion sees the adventurous side in Topper and wishes to bring it out. After dying in a car crash, ghosts Marion and George feel they have to do one good dead to get out of limbo and into heaven. Their mission is to treat Topper to the wild life.

This mission fills the remainder of this delightful screwball comedy. The plotting may have some bumpy spots, but the laughs keep coming. Young is the standout in the film, playing Topper like a man trying to repress a buried child-like glee. From the droll way he handles the dialogue to his perfect physical comedy timing, Young makes Topper a truly memorable character.

Bennett and Grant are perfectly cast as the rich, young socialites, trying to do a good dead by taking Topper down a road to “sin.” That’s a delightfully subtle subversive thing. The film has a fresh free-spirit despite the fact that it’s nearly 70 years old. Sometimes when old plots are redone they are built upon and the original loses its punch. Other times ideas are recycled so much they show their thinness. TOPPER is a perfect example of how a story that’s been redone time and time again can still seem totally original because it had it right in the first place and the imitators could never recapture that spark.