Blithe Spirit

Blithe Spirit is a 1945 British fantasy-comedy feature 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 material for his fictional exposé of a criminal psychic, novelist Charles Condomine invites eccentric medium Madame Arcati to his home in Lympne, Kent, to conduct a séance.
more