Word: toppered
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...Topper Returns," Hal Roach's third venture into ectoplasmic comedy, blends murder and laugher into a mixture which falls only inches short of a Bob Hope rib-tickling, spine-tingling cocktail. Bovine-bosomed Joan Blondell as the lady who vanishes and Roland Young as Cosmo Topper, the defective detective, pace an excellent cast which includes Rochester, Carole Landis, and Billie Burke. Much above the average little girl who isn't there type of picture, this is if anything better than Topper's first two appearances...
...Coque Bruyere, a twelve-year-old timber topper owned by John Strawbridge of Philadelphia: the Maryland Hunt Cup, classic climax of the U.S. steeplechase season; outjumping Stuart S. Janney's Vaunt in a neck-&-neck finish to the grueling four-mile race; before a crowd of 25,000; on the estate of Socialite J. W. Y. Martin, near Baltimore. Time...
...Topper Returns (United Artists) is the straightforward title to a roundabout whodunit. As on two previous occasions, Cosmo Topper, Thorne Smith's shy, baffled little gentleman who consorts with ghosts, is played by wispy Roland Young. This time his customary bewilderment is complicated by a murder in a creaky old manse with sliding panels and secret passageways...
...Topper's nextdoor neighbors are a houseful of leering, peering evildoers and a pair of curvaceous blondes. One blonde (Carole Landis) has returned from China to inherit the place. The other (Joan Blondell) strings along as friend and funster, gets a knife in her back before the night is out. Follows the usual Thorne Smith transmogrification in which Joan turns ghost, floats over to Topper's house, lures him, his wife (Billie Burke), her maid (Patsy Kelly) and his colored chauffeur (Eddie Anderson) back to the scene of the crime for a dose of spooks. Before Topper points...
Following the present fad of humorizing homicide (Arsenic and Old Lace, Mr. and Mrs. North), Topper Returns puts the emphasis on nonsense. Some of it is just tiresome repetition of one of the cinema's pet tricks-an invisible person startling the other characters by smoking a cigaret, rowing a boat, opening a door. Some is fair comedy-Roland Young's befuddled resignation to a world of phantoms and foul play; the friendly insolence of Eddie Anderson (Radio Comic Jack Benny's radio butler, Rochester Van Jones). All of it is hokum, tried & true...