Given Cary Grant admitted to taking LSD on at least one occasion, 1938’s Topper Takes a Trip is not about the kind of trip I thought it would be. Also, I keep forgetting he is not the titular character.
Instead, that is Roland Young, once again playing a bumbling bank owner who is forever unlucky and in need of assistance from Constance Bennett. She is the wife of Cary Grant, and they both have been ghosts since the first act of the first picture in this three-film series. Grant will not appear in any new footage here, but only in recycled scenes from the previous movie. For this, he is thanked at length in a clever title sequence where all the names and titles appear as stickers on various items of luggage.
We will see this as a flashback in the trial which opens this installment. The very first shot is of a newspaper vendor and the divorce proceedings we’re about to see is the top headline. That must have been one exceptionally slow news day. Also, if this was that big of a deal, it is very strange there is nobody in the courtroom except the officials and the directly involved parties.
On the stand, Young is asked who was the woman with him in his room at the Seabreeze Hotel. He tries to tell them it was the ghost of Bennett, and you can imagine how well that goes over. I guess nobody thought to use Luminol to check that room, as I would think ectoplasm would show up in the same way as various bodily fluids.
The flashback to the first movie is extensive, with nearly the first ten minutes of the runtime advancing the plot. Still, wife Billie Burke gets the separation that apparently she didn’t want. What sealed the deal is Bennett’s invisible ghost physically moving Young up to Burke’s lawyer and seeming to strike that face in the face from about five feet away. It’s a decent gag.
Immediately afterwards, Bennett drags Young into a bar where more such shenanigans ensue. I especially liked a bit where an incorporeal Bennett shocks the bartender by downing martinis. This is accomplished through wire work, though a close up of the glass suggests a rather viscous fluid was used in place of liquids. The ghost of the dog from the first movie also appears, and after Bennett chooses to become visible, I was hoping she would tell the bartender that is her service ghost.
Bennett convinces Young to follow his wife to France to reconcile with her. Burke is accompanied by duplicitous friend Verree Teasdale, who had been the one to sway Burke into seeking that divorce. Teasdale’s motivation was to get her friend to a certain hotel in France where the proprietor (Franklin Pangborn) will help arrange a romance with himbo Alexander D’Arcy. This rather long con is simply to get as much of Burke’s money as possible. Seems to me it would have been easier to arrange such a scam without crossing the ocean.
Young takes a room in the same hotel and many hijinks ensue around his usually invisible protector assisting him. There is an especially good bit at a casino where Bennett makes the ball on the roulette wheel jump to a different number even after the wheel is entirely at rest. Young isn’t entirely grateful: “I appreciate everything you have done for me, and I’d appreciate it if you never did it again!” There’s also the ghost dog, which leads to Young saying this to a baffled room service delivery man: “I like to keep a bone by the side of the bed in case I wake up at night and want something to gnaw on.” He also keeps ordering two of everything for the single occupancy room, such as two dinners and an extra bed.
There are several setups here which make good use of these friendly ghosts. A showcase scene has a beach ball at least six feet in diameter roll back and forth over D’Arcy, who is buried up to his waist in sand. And he can’t move, because Bennett has stolen his swim trunks. I was wondering if there has ever been a beach ball of that size, but the moment is funny enough for me not to care.
Much like the other two installments in this trilogy, Burke is the one who really steals the show. Superficially, she appears to be an airhead, but there is an odd brilliance to her quirky observations—the kind of sayings for which Yogi Bera was famous. Things like “to think—[my husband] is here. I wonder if I’ll recognize him.” Or this: “Too bad the people in America aren’t French.”
Topper Takes a Trip surprised me by being my favorite of the series. It is the installment with the most emphasis on slapstick, which is no surprise, as director Norman Z. McLeod helmed Monkey Business and Horse Features for the Marx Brothers I never tired of seeing Young stumbling around as he’s pushed and pulled by an invisible force. He also very energetically dances with a partner unseen by others. If it had been made a few decades later, observers would probably wonder if he had borrowed some of Grant’s acid.
Dir: Norman Z. McLeod
Starring Constance Bennett, Roland Young, Billie Burke
Watched on VCI blu-ray