Robert Morley and Felix Aylmar are a couple of high-ranking British officers in the reign of good Queen Anne, recently retired. They have bought a house together on Berkeley Square. When it turns out that Marlborough is in charge of the latest campaign, they realize he's going to lose the war. They rig up a contraption to kill him, but it backfires, killing them. They are condemned to haunt the place discreetly until reigning royalty visits -- there's always an escape hatch.
And so they haunt it, as it is occupied by gentry, and a bawd and her girls, and P. T. Barnum, who turns it into a haunted house exhibit. Will royalty ever visit, freeing them?
It's directed rather lugubriously by Vernon Sewell from Caryl Brahms' and S. J. Simons' comic novel, NO NIGHTINGALE. The two authors had met a couple of decades earlier, when Miss Brahms recruited him to help her write captions for a series of cartoons by David Low. Their first novel, A BULLET IN THE BALLET, arose from her fantasy of killing ballet critic Arnold Haskell. Several novels followed, including the one this is based on. She died in 1982, five days short of her 81st birthday.
S. J. Simon was born Simon Jacoblivitch Skidelsky in Harbin, Manchuria. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was a leading bridge player, co-inventing the Acol bidding system, and writing the funny and still valuable classic Why You Lose At Bridge. He died in 1948, aged 44.
