Product: Topper Returns (UK PAL Region 0)
Rating: 5.0
Blondell Begins Her Descent
One of the greatest screen personalities of the 1930s, Joan Blondell found herself being edged out of films by the decade's end. Soon she would be reduced to playing the Shelley Winters parts before Shelley Winters found her niche, and then actually competing with Shelley Winters for the same roles, which must have been terribly frustrating for a talented actress like Blondell. Here she is and you can just see a hint of desperation as she "jumps the shark" into a sort of limbo of "being a star" and "no longer a star." I can picture her face when handed the script, "And you get killed on page 15." What? And this is long before Janet Leigh's brave decision to let her character get killed off in Hitchcock's PSYCHO! But leave it to Joan, she took the part and really ran with it. All the way up to the end she was a classy actress and the definition of "star."TOPPER RETURNS has a lot of fun with the idea of Joan Blondell as a "ghost of her former self." Roland Young, Billie Burke, and winsome Carole Landis offer suitable support. Eddie Anderson tries varying his Rochester persona here--he's great, but the script doesn't give him enough to do--or when it does (like playing with the trained seal) it's the wrong kind of thing. However, like Joan Blondell, he rises above it with style.