Plot
George (Cary Grant) and Marion (Constance Bennett) Kerby are as rich as they are irresponsible. When George wrecks their classy sports car, they wake up from the accident as ghosts. Realizing they aren’t in heaven or hell because they’ve never been responsible enough to do good deeds or bad ones, they decide that freeing their old friend Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) from his regimented lifestyle will be their ticket into heaven.
Topper, a wealthy Wall Street banker, is trapped in a boring job. Worse still, Clara (Billie Burke), his social-climbing wife, seems to care only about nagging him and presenting a respectable façade. On a whim, after George and Marion die, Topper buys George’s flashy sports car. Soon he meets the ghosts of his dead friends, and immediately they begin to liven up his dull life with drinking and dancing, flirting and fun.
The escapades lead quickly to Cosmo’s arrest, and the ensuing scandal alienates his wife Clara. When Cosmo moves out, however, she fears she has lost him forever. Her loyal butler suggests that she lighten up a bit; she decides he’s right and dons the lingerie and other attire of “a forward woman.” After Cosmo has a near-death experience and nearly joins George and Marion in the afterlife, Cosmo and Clara are happily reunited, and George and Marion, their good deed done, gladly depart for heaven.
Read more about this topic: Topper (film)
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)