Blithe Spirit (film)
| Blithe Spirit | |
|---|---|
UK film quad poster
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| Directed by | David Lean |
| Produced by | Noël Coward |
| Screenplay by | David Lean Ronald Neame Anthony Havelock-Allan |
| Based on |
Blithe Spirit (1941 play) by Noël Coward |
| Starring |
Rex Harrison Constance Cummings Kay Hammond Margaret Rutherford |
| Music by | Richard Addinsell |
| Cinematography | Ronald Neame |
| Edited by | Jack Harris |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | General Film Distributors (United Kingdom) |
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Release date
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14 May 1945 (UK) |
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Running time
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96 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
Blithe Spirit is a 1945 English fantasy-comedy film directed by David Lean. The screenplay by Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame and associate producer Anthony Havelock-Allan is based on producer Noël Coward's 1941 play of the same name, the title of which is derived from the line "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert" in the poem "To a Skylark" by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The film features Kay Hammond and Margaret Rutherford, in the roles they created in the original production, along with Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings in the lead parts of Charles and Ruth Condomine. While not very successful at the time and a disappointing adaptation according to Coward himself, it has since come to be considered notable for its Technicolor photography and Academy Award-winning visual effects in particular and has been re-released several times, notably as one of the ten early David Lean features restored by the British Film Institute for release in 2008.
Seeking background material for a mystery he is working on, novelist Charles Condomine invites eccentric medium Madame Arcati to his home in Lympne, Kent, to conduct a séance. As Charles, his wife Ruth and their guests, George and Violet Bradman barely restrain themselves from laughing, Madame Arcati performs peculiar rituals and finally goes into a trance. Charles then hears the voice of his dead first wife, Elvira. When he discovers that the others cannot hear her, he passes off his odd behaviour as a joke. When Arcati recovers, she is certain that something extraordinary has occurred, but everyone denies it.
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Wikipedia