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Topper Returns (1941)

Name: Topper Returns
Genre: Comedy
Released: 1941
Duration: 1 h 28 min
Cast: Billie Burke, Joan Blondell, Carole Landis, Patsy Kelly, Dennis O'Keefe

194188 minComedyStrong rights evidence

Topper Returns (1941) is an 88-minute comedy film that airs free on Starlite TV's Laugh Track (CH 3) channel. Our rights research indicates it is in the U.S. public domain (evidence below). Directed by Roy Del Ruth.

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About Topper Returns (1941)

Topper Returns is a 1941 American supernatural comedy thriller film directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Joan Blondell, Roland Young, Carole Landis and Billie Burke. The third and final installment in the initial series of supernatural comedy films inspired by the novels of Thorne Smith, it succeeds Topper (1937) and Topper Takes a Trip (1938).

Wealthy young heiress Ann Carrington and her best friend Gail Richards are riding in a speeding taxi driven by Bob, along the coast. A figure dressed all in black, with covered face and hat, aims a rifle with the telescopic sight crosshairs focused on the cab from a distance and shoots out the rear tire. The taxi flips on its side at the edge of a cliff, inches away from having fallen into crashing ocean waves below. Bob, the taxi driver, extracts his passengers from the vehicle and leaves them at the side of the road so he can walk back to a garage they passed.

Summary adapted from the Wikipedia article Topper Returns (text available under CC BY-SA 4.0).

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Credits

Directed by: Roy Del Ruth
Cast includes: Billie Burke, Joan Blondell, Carole Landis, Patsy Kelly, Dennis O'Keefe, Roland Young, George Zucco, H. B. Warner
Country: United States

Credits from Wikidata · Wikipedia article

Airs on

Laugh Track - CH 3, Comedy TV
Graveyard Shift - CH 4, Horror TV

Rights & source

Basis: Documented as U.S. public domain (e.g. copyright not renewed / no notice)
Evidence: Listed in Wikipedia 'List of films in the public domain in the United States' - reason: Copyright not renewed (cites Pierce 2007 / Fishman / trade sources). Copyright not renewed; Thorne Smith characters (1926) PD.
License on source: creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain
Music: Film soundtrack falls with the film; separately published songs (if any) not individually cleared.
Underlying rights: Copyright not renewed; Thorne Smith characters (1926) PD. 2026-10-10: replaced an XviD copy that was a public-access TV episode ('Weirdness Really Bad Movie') wrapping the film in the show's own host sketches with a film-only 2009 upload in IA's Comedy_Films collection.
Source: Internet Archive

How we check every title: Content & Rights.