AWARDS & HONORS

Topper won two Oscar® nominations, Best Sound and Best Supporting Actor, the latter for Roland Young, who played the title role. He lost to Joseph Schildkraut's performance as Capt. Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola.

The film placed 60th on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 funniest films ever made.

THE CRITICS' CORNER - TOPPER (1937)

"None of the other films of similar theme aroused more than mild enthusiasm among a small group who patronize the arty theatres and talk about pictures in terms of art expression....Effort to excuse the story's absurdities on the theory that the intent is farce comedy does not entirely excuse the production from severe rebuke. Fact also that the living dead are always facetious may be shocking to sensibilities. Some of the situations and dialogue offend conventional good taste." -- Variety.

"...it is Roland Young's show. Between the capricious antics of his abstract companions and the carping of Billie Burke as his wife, his talent for being harassed finds exquisite expression." -- Literary Digest "For those who don't know why Constance Bennett was a big movie star, her provocative, teasing Marion Kerby should provide the answer." – Pauline Kael, 5,001 Nights at the Movies.

"Now it seems an archetypal piece of cinematic fluff from the '30s -- too gentle and leisurely to survive as a solid classic, through there's pleasure to be found in the cast's graceful way with comedy and their smooth ensemble playing." -- Geoff Brown, Time Out.

"Influential supernatural farce, still pretty funny and deftly acted though a shade slow to get going." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide.

"There might be better screwball comedies than Topper, but there aren't many that are funnier...Cary Grant and Constance Bennett excel as the "crazy Kerbys"...Bennett looks terrific in her clinging white beaded dress; with her heavy eyelids, wiggling body and slightly hoarse voice, she evokes a special sort of thirties' sophisticate. Her Marion is a brittle tease, while Grant's George has a savoir-faire that barely suppresses his tightly coiled anger." - Dan Callahan,http://www.culturedose.net/

"There's a giddily delirious frothiness to Topper. You can almost sense the film having been construed in a spirit of dizzily manic euphoria in a determination to throw off the social gloom of The Depression and celebrate people taking nothing at all, not even death, seriously. And Topper is really nothing less than a series of wonderful gonzo scenes....Roland Young gives a wonderfully droll and perfectly dull performance as Topper. Young has a perfect sense of deadpan timing." - Richard Scheib, The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review.

"I would love to live in Noel Coward's universe, where everyone's droll and dresses for dinner, even the dead. Topper, from 1937, isn't one of Coward's -- it's based on a novel by Thorne Smith -- but it's the same spirit. Look, its heroes, the undead Marion and George Kerby (Constance Bennett and Cary Grant), killed themselves by driving drunk and crashing into a tree, and then get to spend the rest of the movie in their evening clothes. There are worse ways to spend eternity, I guess...but the point is, the charming and witty darlings who get to spend eternity wandering around in their evening clothes and haunting their stick-in-the-mud friend Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) died because they were driving drunk. This simply wouldn't happen in a movie today, bad example for the children and all that." - Maryann Johanson, The Flick Filosopher.

Compiled by Frank Miller & Jeff Stafford