The gimmick in this is a standard one: three worlds. The world of the ordinary people in the story. The world of the viewer. The world of spirits that directly manipulates and "stages" the folks in the film world, represented here by a beautiful blond in lux gowns. She's in between the other two.
I'm interested in this because the 30's was a period of great experimentation in narrative, resulting in a few great results. One of these was noir, the unique invention of American film that has been profoundly interesting in movies, religion, dreams (which is much the same) and life. Noir is the notion of the viewer perturbing fate and influencing the characters' world, sometimes denoted by cinematic effects.
See what we have here, a sort of predecessor. The previous "Topper" was quite strange, more of an exploration of sex than anything and one of the many post-code attempts at hinting sex and the importance of influential sex without showing it. This is altogether different though most of the jokes are the same, plus invisible dog jokes.
Here, the ghost manipulates events, stages confrontations, shapes the story. A well shaped story is her "good deed: to be rewarded by God. See the connection? If you are interested in film, you must be of how noir changed the landscape. And then you will be noodling around in the thirties to see how it evolved (no intelligent design here). And you'll come to this.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
