Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Topper Returns Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 15, 2018

Some may feel just a bit of an echo of one of Grandpa Simpson’s rants if I say that back in the Dark Ages of “my day”, many of us had only three broadcast networks to choose from for our television viewing, and because we didn’t know any better, we were pretty happy. In fact it wasn’t until my family moved from the relatively small market of Salt Lake City to the relatively large market of Seattle when I was a kid that I was even introduced to the perhaps dubious wonders of UHF, where suddenly a veritable glut of old rerun programming was available to me on at least a couple of stations with “double digit” channel numbers. One of the shows I had never heard of before that I started watching pretty regularly when I got home from school every day was the old fifties sitcom Topper, a show which posited an uppity guy named Cosmo Topper (Leo G. Carroll) whose house was haunted by its previous owners, a married couple named George and Henrietta Kerby (played by real life husband and wife Robert Sterling and Anne Jeffreys). That Topper of course owed its life (and/or afterlife, as the case may be) to a series of films which started with 1937’s Topper, and which continued with Topper Takes a Trip (due soon from VCI), before returning one last time a few years later with the appropriately named Topper Returns. This third of the original trilogy of Topper films really has relatively little to do with the “original” ghosts of the series, with the Kerby couple nowhere to be found, and instead plays like a middling haunted house mystery with some perhaps cheeky references to then au courant films like Rebecca.

Roland Young secured his sole Academy Award nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category for his work in Topper, but even that recognition didn’t get him above co-star status in the other two Topper films, this despite the fact that he was the only constant in all three films (though there was a Constance — i.e., Bennett, in the first two). The first billed star in this entry is Joan Blondell, playing her typical blowsy type of character, this time an American gal named Gail Richards, who accompanies her friend Ann Carrington (Carole Landis) to the Carrington Estate, where Ann, who has lived overseas her entire life, gets to take a gander not just at the deluxe mansion of her family, but her father Henry Carrington (H.B. Warner), whom she has never met.

The film actually begins with a mysterious masked figure traipsing around menacingly like some kind of bizarre mash up of The Shadow and The Invisible Man. That same cloaked and sunglassed character is seen aiming a rifle at a cab taking Ann and Gail to the Carrington manse, but in just one of several pieces of glaring illogic, while the marksman clearly has the girls right there in his scope, he shoots instead at the tire, causing the car the crash, in what is kind of a bizarre Topper trope. The taxi driver, Bob (Dennis O’Keefe), and the girls emerge relatively unscathed, but when Bob takes off to find help, the girls hitchhike, ultimately forcing Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) and his long suffering chauffeur Eddie (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) to pick them up. (Speaking of The Shadow, kind of unbelievably, those two words are exactly how Rochester is described in the trailer for this film, in a kind of shocking tidbit of political incorrectness.)

The Carrington mansion is filled to the brim with suspicious characters, including Mr. Carrington’s bug eyed doctor Jeris (George Zucco) and housekeeper Lillian (Rafaela Ottiano), who bears more than a passing resemblance to a certain Mrs. Danvers. Ann and Gail end up switching bedrooms, and predictably, Gail bites the dust as a result, wafting over to Cosmo’s house (as a post-mortem spirit, naturally) in order to recruit him to help her figure out why she was killed and what’s going on. Most of the rest of the film plays out back at the Carrington Estate, where Cosmo starts snooping around with a little ghostly help from Gail.

Topper Returns’ mystery is strictly amateur hour (anyone worth their salt is going to guess who the culprit is, especially since this particular plot conceit has been utilized in any number of films), but there is admittedly some fun to be had in this picture. Some of the best bits are actually courtesy of relatively minor player Billie Burke, as Cosmo’s often befuddled wife Clara. Things approach classic farce levels late in the film, with all of the characters (both living and dead) pretty much running hither and yon, and with a harried policeman named Roberts (Donald MacBride) finally entering the fray. I personally had one terrific laugh out loud moment late in the film when Clara just decides willy nilly that she needs to join in with all the hysterical screaming the other female characters have been enjoying (?), and she tries to recruit Roberts to join her. It’s a completely daffy little moment, but it’s the kind of hilarity that this third Topper film only intermittently attains.

Topper Returns Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Topper Returns is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of VCI Entertainment and MVD Visual with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.38:1. I'm scoring this a 3.0 as admittedly a kind of "attaboy" for the folks at VCI, who have struggled with their high definition product. This release sports none of the encoding anomalies seen in some other VCI releases, but it does suffer from some fairly aggressive filtering. There is grain in evidence here, despite how some of these screenshots look, but it's fairly light and it never spikes as expected in any of the (many) opticals throughout this film. Contrast and brightness are also a bit variant, sometimes from moment to moment. All of that said, the overall look here is quite good, given the aforementioned context, with decent if not overwhelming detail and generally secure sharpness (there are some odd moments of lack of clarity toward the left and center left of the frame at certain times). Whatever restoration efforts were employed here have removed most signs of age related wear and tear. Those particularly bothered by noise reduction will probably not rate this much over a 2.0 or 2.5, but I'm seeing some progress with VCI's releases and am granting them a bit of slack.

Topper Returns Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Topper Returns features a decent sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track. The track definitely shows the limitations of its era, with a shallow and pretty boxy sound which is particularly thin sounding in the upper registers. That said, all dialogue, effects and score are presented without any real egregious damage, and without any significant distractions like dropouts.

Topper Returns Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2:40)

Just a little weirdly, the Trailers for the first Topper (1080p; 3:05) and then Topper Takes a Trip (1080p; 2:58) play at disc boot up, but do not seem to be separately accessible elsewhere.

Topper Returns Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Topper Returns is missing the suaveness of Cary Grant (who really wasn't even in the second Topper film, either), and by diverging from the whole Kerby angle, the film becomes kind of an outlier in its own "franchise". That said, there is some fun to be had here, with a game cast of Golden Era notables. VCI continues to struggle a bit with its high definition presentations, so fans are encouraged to parse the screenshots accompanying this review to see how they feel about the video presentation.