adelaidetarheel

Blithe Spirit is a delightful play which has held up better than some others in the Noel Coward canon, so it isn't surprising that of the four somewhat shortened versions of Coward plays presented on British tv in August 1964 it is the most successful.

The play, which deals with an eccentric medium bringing back the late wife of a now remarried husband,was written during WWII,a period in which US film critic Parker Tyler detected a similar interest in Hollywood movies of the time in fantasies about spirits and the after life.

The scene stealer is Carry On veteran Hattie Jacques,who seems aware she is following in the footsteps of the great Margaret Rutherford from the film version,but invests her Madame Arcati with playful slapstick and some roustabout folderol that seem all her own.

Any man who has occasionally felt the presence of an overly smothering woman nearby to be a nuisance will have to smile at the satisfying conclusion.

The writer of the plot summary has it wrong. It is not the elderly mother but the troubled son,who has returned from Paris ,who has a drug habit (cocaine) in this play , the inclusion of which plot point narrowly escaped censorship for the mid 1920s stage premiere.

The somewhat shortened TV adaptation is a curiosity. It is part of a month of Noel Coward presentations,each introduced with retrospective comments from the playwright, on British tv in August 1964.

The actress who plays the mother,Margaret Johnston ,overacts badly but the other cast members aren't bad. The production values are limited. The best of the four plays shown in this series (all directed by Joan Kemp -Welch) is Blithe Spirit which avoids the heavy handed moralizing that The Vortex exudes today.

Aux Petits Bonheurs (Life's Little Treasures) is one of a number of interesting films made by Michel Deville,who left us in February of 2023,that never got a US release Deville was sometimes drawn to ensemble stories like this one written by his wife which focuses on the first four days of a group of mostly aging wonen and men who share a country house during spring vacation time The four episodes are centered on each of the women ,the most interesting of whom is Helene, played by the striking actress Anemone. In the first episode we share her curiosity as an observer ,arriving alone,at who the other people are and what they are up to The film benefits from Deville,s fluid camera style and nice sense of how to block the different players in a scene,as well as the other performers such as Nicole Garcia ,Hanna Schygulla ,Andre Dusollier and Xavier Beauvois The Canadian video I watched makes the misleading comparison with The Big Chill and The Decline of the American Empire. What those two and others like it such as Return of the Secaucus Seven had that this one lacks is any sense of a politics that the group or some of its members have been involved with It is merely a pleasant and occasionally deeper look at a romantic roundelay among some still open and searching characters.