Blithe Spirit Reviews
Turner Classic Movies Online
... a lightweight comedy built on witty remarks and upper-class smugness (which Rex Harrison so perfectly embodies), but comedy is not Lean's strong suit.
Creative Loafing
Blithe Spirit is beloved by so many people that I feel like a curmudgeon handing it a mixed review. But when it comes to supernatural comedies starring Rex Harrison, I much prefer Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1947 The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Q Network Film Desk
While Coward's witty dialogue and pungent take on the mores of the British upper crust can't help but elicit some smiles, as a whole Blithe Spirit feels like a film that is just going through the motions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
EmanuelLevy.Com
As the medium Madame Arcatti, Margareth Rutherford stole every scene in David Lean's screen adaptation of Nowel Coward's witty play.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Inasmuch as this is largely a photographed copy of the stage play [by Noel Coward], the camerawork is outstandingly good and helps to put across the credibility of the ghost story more effectively than the flesh and blood performance does.
Time Out
Top CriticNifty special effects for the time, and plenty of Coward's inimitable wit and repartee.
Movie Mom at Yahoo! Movies
Worth it just for Margaret Rutherford as a sort of girls' school gamesmistres-style psychic!
| Original Score: 4/5
Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC)
The last word in witty repartee of the most civilized kind - the sort of thing Noel Coward was known for, and nobody did better.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Passably good, but it should have been better, what with Rex Harrison, Constance Cummings, and Margaret Rutherford reading the Noel Coward lines.
