It’s interesting to me that the Academy both decided that the title role of Cosmo Topper was supporting, giving Roland Young his only Oscar nomination for it, and failed to nominate Cary Grant for what then was presumably the lead, as George Kerby. (I’d definitely have put Grant in above Fredric March for A Star Is Born, myself, but my distaste for those movies is well established.) It’s sad to me that the Topper movies have mostly faded from the public view much as the ghosts of the Kerbys. And that’s only in part because Roland Young is such a delight in them; they really are very well cast movies.

Roland Young, from what little I’ve seen him in, excelled in playing upper middle class men who were either English or that sort of American aristocracy where they might as well have been—Old Money, you know. He is Uncle Willie in The Philadelphia Story, for example. The sort of character where you can’t help using the word “affable.” It is perhaps little surprise to discover that his first screen role was as Watson to John Barrymore’s Sherlock Holmes; Watson is an early example of the type, and it’s not hard to picture his interactions with Victorian ghosts going the way Topper’s with slightly more recent ones do.

I do keep coming back to Topper, and it’s not just that I haven’t actually seen vast swathes of Young’s career. It’s that it’s such a good series of movies that we just don’t discuss enough these days. For those unfamiliar with the films, Cosmo Topper is a stuffy New York banker whose dizzy wife is Billie Burke. He’s extremely set in his ways and only slightly sad about that. Then one day, his clients, the Kerbys, are killed, and only he can see their ghosts. They decide that the good deed they need to do to get to Heaven is to loosen up “Toppy.” There are two more movies following his adventures; in the one I’ve seen more often, he has to help a ghost played by Joan Blondell solve her own murder.

They’re heaps of fun, and Young is great in them. He embodies that stuffy banker so well, and you don’t have any doubt that he would marry Billie Burke’s character young and spend the rest of his life unsure what to do with her. And that he could be both drawn to and appalled by the life the Kerbys lead. That’s the sort of character Roland Young played and played very well, and it’s rather a shame that his name doesn’t come up in the conversation more often.

Of course, he started out middle aged and spent his whole life that way, from what you can tell based on his film career. Watson, after all, is not a role for a young man. I’ve resisted making jokes about his last name, but there it is—when he started in Hollywood, he was already 35. We tend to only talk about actors who do good work in their middle years if they started doing good work when they were young, with one or two exceptions, and Roland Young just isn’t one of those exceptions.

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