I love this movie so much

the audience applauded

Best movie ever!

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The film version is enjoyable up to a point. Kay Hammond's sardonic and sultry performance is the best thing about it. Rex Harrison is good, but I'd love to have seen the stage version with Cecil Parker - he was so funny. Margaret Rutherford created the role of Madame Arcati, and has imported much of her stage business. Someone should have told her to calm down a bit. She can't throw her head back (she was 53 and you lose flexibility), so she arches her back and flings back her arms as if they were wings - far, far too often. And the dancing about and singing meaninglessly just miiiiight have worked on stage. As might the berating of a ghost you can't see who keeps moving about. However, Rutherford is surprisingly svelte and wears some wonderfully eccentric striped blouses, teamed with unfortunate folkweave waistcoats and tweed skirts. Poor Ruth, the second wife, doesn't have great taste in clothes either, wearing green with rhinestones for the first seance.We assume that Mr Condomine has made a lot of money from his books – you could in those days – enough to fund a fairly lavish but uncomfortably formal lifestyle. Note the changing for dinner, and bowls of flowers everywhere. The C's do not live on an "estate", however, but in a large, fairly modern house with a garden (necessary to supply the flowers).One joke you may miss. Ruth drives into the village to persuade Madame Arcati to exorcise Elvira. She draws up to a picturesque cottage - surely the dwelling of the mystic medium! But no, she stops at the next house: a prosaic suburb pebble-dashed home. The main joke of Madame Arcati is that you expect a medium to be portentous, affected or maybe suburban, but she comes across like a games mistress from a girls' boarding school. This doesn't quite come off – she should seem much more down to earth when she is not doing her act.

Blithe Spirit is a great play. I also remember enjoying it on TV in the very old black and white days. As a fantasy in glorious technicolor, it actually loses something. I don't think that fantasies work that well in color. In this case, the color is an actual problemAs I get older and older And totter toward the tomb Movies ghosts in florescent green Fill my heart with morbid gloomRex Harrison usually played a comedic role Of an arrogant, entitled, self centered cad. In real life, Rex was all of this and much, much worse So now Rex's antics aren't funny. They are sad.Sure, Margaret Rutherford was funny, but she kept doing the same shtick for the rest of her career, so her antics were quite predictable. The green ghosts were bilious. Kay Hammond kept fluttering her arms in a way which was incongruous with her lines. It was painful to watch her. Rex Harrison was supposed to be a sympathetic character harassed by his ghostly wives, but he was annoying. Perhaps the reports that he was an absolute boor in real life colored my judgement.

This spirited romp ranks up there as one of funniest film adaptations ever made of a Noel Coward story. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the performances in this breezy farce-- based on Coward's hit stage play-- are nearly unmatchable. Of note is Margaret Rutherford, who steals scenes left and right as Madame Arcati, a highly eccentric medium. In later productions, the medium has been played by Estelle Winwood, Mildred Natwick, Ruth Gordon and Angela Lansbury-- but I think Rutherford's performance is the one to watch. David Lean's direction is flawless and the film is done in such beautiful, breath-taking Technicolor that it is truly a joy to watch.

I recently saw the Broadway revival of "Blithe Spirit" starring Angela Lansbury, Rupert Everett, Christine Ebersole, and Jayne Atkinson. It's a terrific production, and shows what good actors can do with a play that is less than perfect. Angela Lansbury is extremely funny as Madame Arcati.It was probably a mistake, then, to check out the film version of the play starring Rex Harrison. The movie does not have the energy or the laughs of a good stage production."Blithe Spirit" is probably one of those plays that works better with a live cast, in an audience full of people who have come to laugh. The actors can improvise, give touches and nuances to their performance and delivery of the lines, and involve the audience on a personal level that you can't get in a movie house, or with a DVD showing, where the audience is separated from the story by the "Fourth Wall." The story: Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison), a successful writer, lives with his wife Ruth (Constance Cummings) in a house in the English countryside. Seeking information for his next book, a book dealing with the supernatural, Charles invites Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford, reprising her role from the original 1941 London production), a local spiritual medium, over to his house to conduct a séance. Charles believes that spiritism is a sham, but hopes to pick up "the tricks of the trade." But then Madame Arcati brings back the ghost of Elvira (Kaye Hammond), Charles's first wife, who died of pneumonia seven years ago. Elvira refuses to leave, and develops a spitting rivalry with Ruth over Charles (complicated by the fact that only Charles can see or hear Elvira).On stage, the actors can give performances that invite laughs in this situation. But on the screen, the actors in "Blithe Spirit" tear through the lines as if they don't know that anyone is listening to them. They mumble lines that were designed to get laughs on the stage. The performances by Harrison, Cummings, and even Kaye Hammond are flat and lifeless. Only Margaret Rutherford seems to have retained her spark and humor as Madame Arcati.The Oscar-winning visual effects in the film are unimpressive -- not just by today's standards, but by the standards of 1946! They consist mostly of Kaye Hammond walking around in fluorescent green outfits and makeup, being photographed in special lighting to make her look like a glowing ghost.The cinematographer deserves some credit for creative lighting. But compare the dull visual effects of "Blithe Spirit" to the truly groundbreaking effects in Disney's "Song of the South" -- which was eligible for awards the same year. In "South," humans and animated characters share the screen seamlessly for minutes at a time. Compared to "South," the Oscar that "Blithe Spirit" received for special effects was completely undeserved.At any rate, I can only encourage you to catch the Broadway revival of this play with Angela Lansbury before it closes. As for the movie with Rex Harrison, skip it.