Topper Returns (1941)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) As much as I’ve grown allergic to overly laborious origin stories in other circumstances (for instance, in movies about already widely-known characters), there is a definite strangeness in stepping into a series through the third instalments, with many series characteristics already established and in play without much justification. Topper Returns is the third instalment in a series featuring a mild-mannered banker with the power of seeing ghosts, and the complications that ensue when his wife doesn’t understand what’s going on. Clearly playing into its established mythology, it does move at a fairly fast clip—our heroine gets killed (taking it rather well), then finds Topper and recruits him to both solve her own murder and prevent her friend from being murdered as well. The tone of the film is semi-comic—despite the violence inherent in the premise, the characters are upbeat, and the film can’t help but feature a befuddled wife and a bewildered black servant. (I’d like for the servant character to be less stereotyped, but it’s a 1941 film, and the character goes gets a decent amount of screentime.) There’s a pleasant, well-oiled quality to the way the film runs through its paces, exploiting its spooky house setting (always a favourite of mine) and actually going through a surprising amount of plot in less than 90 minutes. The optical special effects are quite good in their own way. Topper Returns is arguably more popular today than its predecessors thanks to accidentally ending up in the public domain, but it’s a reasonably good movie in its own right.