The ghosts of past wives have turned up in movies of all sorts, but never so delightfully as in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, faithfully and elegantly rendered here by director David Lean. Rex Harrison plays the novelist whose second marriage (to Constance Cummings) is seriously complicated by the arrival of his dead first wife (Kay Hammond); she travels lightly, via the medium of Margaret Rutherford. Originally shot in Technicolor, the film is lovely; but Lean employs a minimum of optical tricks in order to spotlight the magnificent dialogue and ensemble acting of Coward's original play. One of four films on which Coward and Lean collaborated, Blithe Spirit has been proclaimed by London's National Film Theatre “one of the funniest British films ever made.”