For an intoxicating mixture of spooks and nonsensical fun, "The Ghost Goes West", now showing at Keith Memorial, is just about the best thing in the last light-year of film reeled out of Hollywood. Jean Parker, just eighteen and refreshingly demure, is beautifully set by the skill of Rene Clair against the gentle sophistication of Robert Donat. And when haunts stop scaring you and make you laugh, you are bound to laugh twice as hard as usual.

A Scotch warrior set upon destroying the clan of McLaglen instead of the invading English, is blown up by a keg of powder after having dallied with a shepherdess and field ignominiously from the scions of the hated clan. For this he is condemned by his father, the head of the clan of Glouer, to wander about the ancestral castle until he, Murdoch Glouer the ghost, can tweek the beak of a McLagen and force him to admit that any fifty of his clan can be thrashed with ease by a lone Glouer.

The Spook Transplanted

Then along comes Jean Parker, a pretty American girl, and Eugene Pallette, her bleated American father. The befuddlement of Jean over the winning warmth of the ghost, as gallant as ever, and the self-conscious timidity of his living image causes no end of mildly uproarious confusion. But the whole mess is neatly resolved when the castle is moved to Florida, and surrounded by a moat containing Venetian gondolas, to give a European atmosphere.

You finish this picture with bland approbation of the charming impossibility of it all, and then you are jarred back to earth to see one of Major Bowes' amateurs imitate Zasu Pitts and Mao West (I).