TOPPER TAKES A TRIP (1939)
Article #1113 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 4-1-2004
Posting Date: 8-29-2004
Directed by Norman Z. McLeod
Featuring Roland Young, Constance Bennett, Billie Burke

Topper must go to France to prevent his wife from getting a divorce and marrying a man who is after her money. He is accompanied by the ghost of Marion Kerby.

If this movie labors under one burden, it is that Cary Grant, who played George Kerby in TOPPER, does not appear in this sequel except in footage from the original movie. Fortunately, this isn’t a particularly heavy burden; the appeal of the Topper movies was in the variety of eccentric comic characters rather than any one in particular, and when all is said and done, Roland Young was probably the actor whose presence was most necessary. My print suffers under another burden; it is one of those colorized prints that makes everything a dullish pastel color, and as usually the case of colorization, it merely adds unnecessary distraction. The movie itself is for all practical reasons a repeat of the previous movie; outside of giving a little more for Billie Burke to do, it really doesn’t add anything really new to the mix. It’s amusing and well-done (as was the original) but also a bit unnecessary. Cosmo Topper would return in one more movie, TOPPER RETURNS, which, unlike the other two movies, was not directly based on a novel by Thorne Smith.