The Film Experience

Each month before the Supporting Actress Smackdown, Nick Taylor suggests alternatives to the actual Oscar nomination ballot.

by Nick Taylor

For me, Dame Margaret Rutherford sits alongside the likes of Judi Dench and Edith Evans and (insert your favorite British actress/Mark Rylance here) as quintessential examples of British thespians transitioning to remarkably rewarding screen careers later in life, long after establishing their bonafides onstage. What’s recognizable about their screen presences is seemingly integral to every role, though they’re rangier in affect and character-building than one might give them credit for. They almost always deliver, and even when they don't, there's still enough happening in their work for a desperate viewer to latch onto. It takes talent for Rutherford to be compelling enough in The VIPs that you wonder if her performance deserves to be in a better film instead of scraped with the rest of the heap.

It’s also worth noting for the context of Blithe Spirit that Noël Coward wrote the role of Madame Arcati specifically with Rutherford in mind...

She was reviewed as a smashing success when the play premiered in 1941. Blithe Spirit is the story of a bougie Enligsh couple who are haunted by the husband's first wife after a seancé at their house., Rutherford plays the addled medium who let that spirit loose. She, along with Kay Hammond as the mesmerizing first wife, was transported into David Lean’s film adaptation in 1945. It didn’t hit US soils until the next year, winning a well-deserved Oscar for its special effects for its troubles. Still, in a year where the Academy was already celebrating another slightly delayed Lean-Coward production, left out on behalf of a Supporting Actress lineup that has . . . . aged, it’s an odd surprise to find Rutherford sitting out on the sidelines.

There’s a good bit of buildup to Rutherford’s Madame Arcati in the going minutes of Blithe Spirit. Writer Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison, better than his other starring role this year) has invited the world-renowned medium to his home as covert research for a book he’s writing about an occultist. The character in his story is an utter fraud, and though Arcati believes the invitation is sincere, Condomine hasn’t shared that he’s casting her in the role of a stooge. The party is hosted by Condomine and his second wife Ruth (Constance Cummings) and further attended by their friends George and Violet (Hugh Wakefield and Joyce Carey), all of whom plan to watch and snicker behind her back. Our one glimpse of her in the nearly uninterrupted eight minutes devoted to speculating on her authenticity - with only a conversation between the Condomines about Charles’ long-dead first wife Elvira (Hammond, yet to make her entrance) - is the sight of her gliding on her bikes towards the Condomine’s house, in a heavy textile coat, a red velvet dress with white floral frills at the cuffs, and gloves that look like those one would wear when using gardening shears.

In short, the buildup for Madame Arcati suggests that we’re in for a certain kind of comic scene-stealer, deathly unaware of how daffy she is despite her obvious, bumbling ridiculousness. The cutaway of Arcati riding her bike is certainly striking, but it’s mostly derived from costuming and scoring. Who is she, and how will Rutherford play her?

As it turns out, Rutherford’s take on Madame Arcati inhabits a voluptuous liminal space between eccentric curiosity and unabashed conviction, pushing the comedy of Blithe Spirit in a broader direction than most of the cast attempts without upending it into farce or disrupting the other actors. This is all the more impressive given how much of Rutherford’s humor relies on both a greater degree of expressiveness than her co-stars as well as a strong amount of physical comedy, going against the prim Englishness of her hosts with gusts of energy. She’s always moving, bobbing her head in conversation or scrunching her face at a bad joke or making gestures to further illustrate some point she’s making. Sometimes she does all three at once. When she’s absolutely still, as when she gazes upon an upsettingly rare cut of meat, her deadpan disgust is funnier than if she’d made a production of it. I have no idea how much of her gestures and line readings are directly transposed from her stage performance, but it's a great feat of theatrical acting that's perfectly attuned to the demands of the camera.

Between all of the dashing around living rooms and hosting her seancé, she’s simply happy to be there. Her enthusiasm when discussing her trade is palpable, and she comes across as responding fully and earnestly to her hosts’ questions, rather than sucking all the oxygen out of the room and pontificating about her craft. Both the character and the actress are remarkably communicative with everyone else, leaving plenty of room for the other actors to actually respond to her instead of leaving them gawking at some impenetrable sideshow act or leaving them to keep up with her brilliance. Everyone's in sync with each other. In fact, it's a pretty strong cast, even as Rutherford and Hammond clearly take MVP honors.

Rutherford is not just a dish with her line readings but an uncannily fun reactor, and she supplies plenty of intriguing notes in delineating when Madame Arcati has decided to speak out about a perceived insult or when she chooses not to vocalize it, even if her opinion is plainly legible on her face. She gets a great entrance, bursting through the back entrance after everyone hears the doorbell ring rushes to the front of the house. The first thing she does when she enters the Condomine’s home is tells Charles she was late because she felt a tire on her bike was going to break and she went home to get a spare. Fortunately, the tire was fine! Charles consolingly tells her that it might pop on the way back, and Arcati looks at him like she’s trying to guess if he’s an idiot or just rude. If she never catches on to why she’s been invited, she certainly picks up on when George is being a bit too priggish for her liking. She's very quick to give offense once she sense she's been insulted, responding in a vaguely patronizing way when she's only slightly bothered and getting very cross when her occupation is openly mocked. When she says her goodbyes to George, you get the sense she's trying very hard and mostly failing not to seem as cross as she is.

During the seancé, Rutherford warns Charles against being flippant, and this, I think, is the key to Rutherford’s interpretation of the role. There’s no irony to Madame Arcati - you get the sense she always means precisely what she’s saying, endowing her with a level of sincerity and credibility that makes Blithe Spirit work far better than if it was about a quack learning she had powers. Thank goodness she forgoes imposing some story arc onto Madame Arcati. Instead, she justifies Blithe Spirit as a comedy while contributing a rounded, appealing characterization for the film to pivot around every so often. It’s not that the sight of Rutherford dancing through the Condomine’s house or setting up elaborate tableaux that might cast out Elvira isn’t a bit silly on its face, but she conducts her business in such a way that making fun of her seems beside the point. Either you believe in her or you don’t, and looking dignified in conducting such business is clearly secondary to doing the work.

It’s a frankly fantastic mad scientist performance, all rooted in the giddiness of an expert and colored with the sensibilities and style of a robust, active gardener. When Ruth visits her to relay that she and Charles have been haunted by Elvira, Madame Arcati is so excited she barely knows what to do with her arms, raising them in celebration before holding them behind her back and sort of running around her living room. She’s so delighted to learn she successfully summoned a ghost that she forgets Ruth is there asking for help. Later, when Ruth blames Madame Arcati for Elvira’s arrival and reveals that Charles invited her to the party to mock her, Rutherford’s puffs out her chest and holds her body like she’s trying to overcompensate for how wounded she is, even as it’s obvious in her ever-rising voice how offended she is. And even after this insult, she needs no persuasion when Charles comes calling for help in exorcizing his first wife. She’s too excited to meet Elvira to carry that chip on her shoulder, and too thrilled at the challenge of returning her to the other side not to accept his request. The ensuing montage of failed attempts earns its laughs, but it's unexpectedly gratifying to watch Madame Arcati solve the mystery of how to perform the exorcism. And when she tells Charles to get out of dodge for a bit, you know he should listen.

In short, if you’re walking away from this year’s supporting actress roster (or, y’know, my other alternatives) and would like to continue your research with a pretty good comedy, look no further! Blithe Spirit is a hoot, and nails what I would consider the two most necessary elements for the film to work. Everything about Elvira, from all the visual effects and costuming and makeup used to conjure her ethereal presence to Kay Hammond’s winning, self-amused performance, holds up beautifully. And Rutherford is a treasure, earning the scene-stealer status the role has accrued over the years without once looking like she’s trying to purloin the whole film.

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