René Clair's whimsy and Robert Sherwood's romantic cynicism (he wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel as well) are combined in this dour comedy. Robert Donat nicely underplays a dual role as an eighteenth century Scot consigned to purgatory in the family castle, and his twentieth century ancestor, the castle's now-impoverished laird. The gravelly voiced Eugene Pallette is an American millionaire, the archtypical self-made man, who purchases an ancestry in the haunted castle and ships it lock, stock and goblin to a palm grove in Florida. There he has it rebuilt with all the modern conveniences. The film relishes in its jabs at the Scottish (the ghost hails from an era when kilts and clan wars were the rage), and particularly at the Americans, with their split personality: the ghost is greeted by official paranoia and a ticker-tape parade.