Topper (1937)
Directed by Norman Z. McLeod
Madcap couple George and Marion Kerby are killed in an automobile accident. They return as ghosts to try and liven up the regimented lifestyle of their friend and bank president, Cosmo Topper. When Topper starts to live it up, it strains relations with his stuffy wife.
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What critics compared Topper to
Breezing into screwball-romance terrain charted by such otherworldly standards as "Blithe Spirit," "Topper" and "Ghost," writer-director David Koepp seems liberated by the chance to put repartee front and center.
The British comic plays Bertram Pincus, a misanthropic dentist in New York City who develops an ability to see dead people; to be specific, the dead are noodgy, solid-looking ghosts of the type that populated the Cary Grant movie Topper.
The premise of a ghost—or multiple ghosts—that only one person can see dates back to at least Topper (1937), to which Ghost Town owes a significant debt.
While growing up in days of yore, I loved the Topper movies.
At its essence, Ghost Town is Topper multiplied, with Gervais' misanthropic dentist Bertram Pincus seeing dead people all over Manhattan following a botched medical procedure (some of the film's funniest scenes involve the brilliant Kristin Wiig as a purposefully inarticulate surgeon and Michael-Leon Wooley as her in-house legal counsel).
Again, Koepp has delivered something of a throwback, but his inspirations are marvelous: "Ghost Town" offers an update of the supernatural farce found in "Topper," "Here Comes Mr. Jordan" and other comedies from Hollywood's so-called golden age, when the term "adult" meant "sophisticated."
Now, before you can say "Topper," these ghosts are not fun-loving or mischievous by nature.
Like Cary Grant and Constance Bennett in Topper, their life together on earth is cut short by an accident.