This was originally published in the former The Classic Film Collective Patreon.
Cary Grant (George Kerby)
Roland Young (Cosmo Topper)
Billie Burke (Mrs. Topper)
One of the most beloved screwball comedies to come out of the thirties, Topper (1937), directed by Norman Z. McLeod, stars Constance Bennett and Cary Grant as a pair of free spirited ghosts who show middle-aged bank executive Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) what it really means to live. During their lifetime, Marion and George Kerby (Bennett and Grant) happily spent their days enjoying lavish parties, plenty of booze and wild road trips through the countryside. On one tragic day, George’s erratic driving causes them to have a fatal head-on collision with a tree. They shed their bodies but their spirits remain on earth in various degrees of visibility. As ghosts in limbo, their mission to ascend to heaven is to take Topper under their wing. They draw him away from his humdrum life with his uptight wife Mrs. Topper (Billie Burke) and the madcap adventures begin.
Topper (1937) was an adaptation of Thorne Smith’s 1926 novel of the same name. Born out of the prohibition era and the Jazz age, Topper is chock-full of fun alcohol-fueled escapades. Smith mostly wrote comedies and Topper and its sequel Topper Takes a Trip were his best known works. Topper pokes fun at the lifestyles of the upper and upper-middle class families while also driving home the simple but potent message that life is worth living.
At the heart of the novel is the opposition between hedonism and sensibility. Cosmo and Mrs. Topper live their lives as as though it were a “summer of Sundays”. Topper himself is caught in between. He wants to live life but the people who surround him view passion and enthusiasm as personal failures. As though there was a thing as too much enjoyment. Marion and George Kirby are described as “the fastest young couple in town” whose journey culminated in “a gay life and a quick death.” I love this line in particular which compares the Kerbys to the social set that the Toppers belonged to:
“The Kerbys had not belonged to his set, the solid substantial, commuting set, but had gathered round them, from all parts of the country, a group of irresponsible spirits, who would suddenly appear in a swarm of motors, riot around the town and countryside for a few days, and then as suddenly disappear in a cloud of dust and a chorus of brazen horns.”
Throughout the book, the dichotomy between living and just existing becomes the story’s strongest theme. Just existing is considered a form of death and characters who are truly living can either be physically dead or alive. Topper’s journey is referred to as an “incredible vacation,” a way for him to break out of his shell and tap into his inner joy. The Mrs. Topper character in particular serves as a warning that being “half alive” is no real way to live. Here are some quotes from the book that explore the theme of living vs. dying:
“For the first time Topper’s established routine of living gave place to a disorderly desire to live.”
“Mr. Topper came to regard himself as a corpse, without, however, enjoying a corpse’s immunity to its surroundings.”
“Any creature, man or beast, who has the capacity and desire to enjoy life deserves that enjoyment.”
Although in the book the Kerbys don’t need to help Topper to get into heaven, they do make it a mission to help Topper come out of his shell. The Kerbys in the film are ghosts who, when fully visible, inhabit the world of the living as members of society but when invisible cause absolute chaos when invisible. In the book the Kerbys are described as “low-planed” spirits. High planed spirits don’t live on earth nor can they make themselves visible. Low-planed spirits can store up “ectoplasm” (???) to achieve varying degrees of “thickness”. It’s all a very bizarre way to describe ghosts but in a way this works especially when it translates to a visual medium like film.
If you remember from the film, at one point George Kerby disappeared and you may have wondered: where did Cary Grant go? In the novel, George goes off on a seaside adventure leaving Marion behind to galavant with Topper. The scenes where Marion and Topper get into some riotous fun together, sans George, is a way for Topper to have a makeshift affair without committing actual adultery. Marion proclaims she’s no longer married now that she’s dead and Topper is embarrassed when hotel staff come to investigate reports of an unregistered woman in his room. A little tantalizing but never crosses the line which makes the film censorship friendly in the age of Hays Code enforcement. Having an emotional affair with Marion becomes a more important element of the book while in the film it's treated as a light flirtation.
The butler Wilkins, played by Alan Mowbray, who is constantly judging Topper and siding with the more sensible Mrs. Topper, isn’t in the book at all. Instead, Topper’s constant companion at home is his beloved cat Scollops. There are several running jokes about how the Toppers suffer from indigestion (“dyspesia”), how Mrs. Topper insists that Topper always enjoys a good leg of lamb for dinner, the predictability of which annoys Topper. The book also includes three other ghosts that aren’t in the film: the Colonel, his wife Mrs. Hart and their dog Oscar, who struggles to become fully visible and instead can only be seen in partial form.
I’m impressed by how the screenwriting team Jack Jevne, Eric Hatch and Eddie Moran transformed Thorne Smith’s story into an enjoyable 1-1/2 hour screwball comedy that allows the triumvirate of Bennett, Grant and Young shine. The novel takes a while to get to introduce the Kerbys and there are so many stories with Marion and Topper gallivanting around that the more concise approach the film takes allows the story not to lose steam as it does quite often in the novel. Unfortunately the author never lived to see the film adaptation in 1937 because he died at the age of 42 in 1934. Or perhaps, his ghost attended the premiere? We’ll never know.
Topper by Thorne Smith is a bit of a mixed bag but still quite enjoyable. I read Modern Library’s 1999 paperback edition.
