Word: well-cast
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...interesting idea for a movie, and well-cast. But in the execution the idea gets lost, and estranged from what happens on the screen. So an interpretation of the film is a faintly boring afterthought: in the theater it's clear that significant things are going on, but precisely what they are is unclear unless you force yourself to mull it over afterwards, an artificial resurrection of what you think went...
Topper. A couple of decadent ghosts (Cary Grant and Constance Bennett-- who is disqustingly cutesie here) try to loosen up a stodgy and henpecked banker (Roland Young, well-cast). We are supposed to sympathize with the decadent ones and think that they've found the only way to live: the only trouble is that their idea of living is more than having harmless drunken fun--they're selfish and cruel and irresponsible throughout. This is a thirties high society movie that you just can't pardon. It isn't even very witty. With Billie Burke, the Good Witch...
...acting is also topnotch. Robert Redford's McKay is a perfect seemingly sexless but actually hungry, American idealist; MeIvyn Douglas is fine as his corrupt father; Don Porter, veteran of fatherly roles in TV sitcoms, is well-cast as Crocker Jarmon--rhetorically smooth, with the sincerity of a born exhibitionist and a rockribbed physical facade. But Peter Boyle steals the show as Marvin Lucas, McKay's mysterious New York-based campaign manager. Lucas is tough, and smart, and flexible, a Madison Avenue superman; but in his own oily way we feel he cares more seriously than anyone else...
Karl Baldwin is well-cast as the "real man" who punctuates his brogued sentences to the ladies with frequent damns, and calls his faithful hunting dogs his best friends. But the strongest performance of the production is Tanya Contos's as Irene. Her reveries and reproaches fill the stage with the past, and she shifts easily back and forth from half-mad laughter to sober despair. Ken Bartel's direction respects Ibsen's carefully built-up structure of recurrent phrases and gestures. The result is a straightforwardly loyal production whose tense sadness is too direct to be shirked...
First-night insecurity may have been the only thing that kept most of the cast from succeeding completely in their almost uncanny recreations of the attitudes and mannerisms of the people they played. The well-cast roles of the defendants are dramatic plums for the actors who fill them; the actors are obviously advocates of the play's political position, and when they testify point-blank to the audience, it's personal as well as acted testimony. In that situation, it's difficult for them to speak their own opinions while trying to sustain someone else's identify...