“TOPPER” FILM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 May 1939, Page 5

“TOPPER” FILM

TRICKS OF THE TRADE. One of the most successful screen comedies of last year was Hal Roach’s “Topper,” starring Constance Bennett, Cary Grant and Roland Young. Now producer Roach is making a sequel. “Topper Takes a Trip,” which promises to be even funnier than the original. “Special effects” which, in “Topper,” included “materialisations and de-ma-terialisatiohs” of Miss Bennett and Grant, cars that were driven and changed tyres without any visible assistance from human hands, will again be in charge of Roy Seawright, Roach’s technical expert. The script writers of “Topper Takes a Trip” have made Seawright’s job far more difficult. Apart from such simple tricks as having Miss Bennett disappear while dancing with Roland Young in a crowded restaurant, they require a cocktail to be sipped by an invisible drinker, showing the liquor diminishing but not coming out of the glass, a pencil to write of its own accord with no human assistance, bathing trunks to leap of Alexander D’Arcy (a highly censorable idea, it would appear!), and last but not least, they have cast “Asta,” known in the films as “Atlas," as the lazy pet of Constance Bennett.