THE UNINVITED 1944
Arriving quietly but forcefully in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age, The Uninvited remains one of cinema’s most evocative haunted house stories, wrapping genuine psychological depth in a shimmer of Gothic atmosphere. Directed by Lewis Allen, the film sweeps us up and sets us down in windswept Cornwall, where the urbane Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) impulsively buy a lonely cliffside mansion that promises sea views but is, of course, steeped in whispers, mists, and shadows. What begins as a picturesque escape quickly slides into mystery as the American siblings, joined by local ingénue Stella (Gail Russell), become enmeshed in the old house’s tragic secrets, and spectral forces begin to assert a mournful presence within the walls.
The Uninvited is less about shrieks than chills that creep up softly: flickers of cold air, a woman’s weeping echoing in empty rooms, candles flickering out when no breeze disturbs the air, all the trusty hallmarks of a proper classic ghost story. The film’s legacy is as much about what it doesn’t show as what it reveals; the ghostly is conjured with restraint, allowing our imaginations to fill the void as surely as the roiling waves crash against the cliffs. The supporting cast: Donald Crisp plays Commander Beech, Stella Meredith’s austere grandfather. He sells Windward House to the Fitzgeralds and is deeply protective of Stella, forbidding her from visiting the house due to its tragic past. There’s also the formidable Cornelia Otis Skinner as the imposing Miss Holloway, who runs a nearby sanatorium and is a former and ‘close friend’ of Stella’s late mother, Mary Meredith. Holloway idolizes Mary, and her obsessive devotion leads her to conceal key details about Mary’s tragic fate. Commander Beech’s over-watchful guardianship and Holloway’s maniacal worship of Stella’s mother only deepens the sense of history and unresolved longing that clings to every frame, while Victor Young’s haunting score, most memorably captured in “Stella by Starlight,” adds an indelible note of melancholy.
Stella’s longing for her mother in The Uninvited is a poignant undercurrent of yearning and unresolved grief, embodying the haunting connectedness of love that transcends death and shapes her fragile sense of identity.
Beyond its technical achievements, including shadow-soaked cinematography by Charles Lang Jr., who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the film, and the measured, suspenseful pacing, The Uninvited lingers for its willingness to suggest that the past, with all its grief, love, and unresolved trauma, refuses to stay quiet. The film’s nuanced exploration of haunting both tangible and ethereal, material and otherworldly, makes it a forerunner of the psychological horror genre, and a timeless meditation on longing, inheritance, the inescapable pull of memory, and spectral heartache. The Uninvited is a journey into a beautifully uncanny twilight and one of the most enduring classic ghost stories of 1940s cinema.
THE GHOST AND MRS MUIR 1947
Few ghost stories linger as gently and hauntingly as Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1947 classic, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. Cloaked in the shimmer of Leon Shamroy’s Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography, this film floats between reality and reverie, moored and held steady by performances that ache with longing and wry spirit. Adapted from R. A. Dick’s (a pen name for Josephine Leslie), the author of the original 1945 novel by screenwriter Philip Dunne, (How Green Was My Valley 1941), the film opens with a widowed, quietly rebellious Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney, luminous as ever) leaving the suffocating embrace of her late husband’s family, steely with resolve and trailing a little moonbeam named Anna (Natalie Wood spilling over with an expressive, bright-eyed energy) in tow. Their destination: the brooding, wind-harassed Gull Cottage, perched alone on the English coast, a house that seems to groan with memory and mutter secrets in every gust.
The setup is simple and a touch Gothic. A young widow, hungry for her own life, purchases a house deemed uninhabitable by locals. But within its salt-swept walls, Lucy soon meets the cottage’s former owner, the crusty yet charismatic ghost of Captain Daniel Gregg (played by Rex Harrison with a playful authority, commanding confident charm, and a bit of wounded masculinity). Their first encounters are frothy and flirtatious with comic tension: doors slam; Lucy’s lamp flickers in the dark; the Captain’s briny baritone echoes from nowhere. But what begins as supernatural warfare, her stubborn rationalism pitted against his blustery haunting, slowly evolves into the story’s living, pulsing heart: two souls, adrift in their own loneliness yet awakening, together, to something far more.
Scene by scene, the film traces Lucy’s defiant settling in. Rejecting both her in-laws’ interference and the local estate agent’s warnings, Lucy and Anna shape a home beneath Gregg’s spectral, sometimes overbearing guidance. The Captain becomes her confidant and protector, teaching her self-reliance (and even how to curse a little, should the occasion demand!). He tells her the salty saga of his seafaring life, shares a quiet gentleness masked by roguish banter, and coaxes Lucy out of the shadows of her own wariness.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir possesses this gentle magic where romance and the supernatural mix so seamlessly and it’s in the film’s middle that reveals its most brilliant twist: Captain Gregg proposes Lucy ‘ghost’ write his memoirs, “Blood and Swash,” a rollicking account of his adventures at sea ( a captivating sendup of romance and adventure novels that were popular back then). Scenes of Lucy poised at her writing desk, ghostly dictation swirling in the night air, give the narrative a lovely, otherworldly shimmer, caught perfectly between practicality and enchantment, sensible and spellbinding. The manuscript’s biting wit and Gregg’s gruff narrative voice prove irresistible to London publishers, and the newly financially comfortable Lucy forges a life on her own terms, able to glimpse the edges of freedom.
Enter George Sanders as Miles Fairley, a visiting author whose charm veils a snake’s duplicity, a duplicity that only Sanders could manifest. Lucy’s tentative romance with Miles, set against the always-present, invisible Captain, flickers between real-world possibility and spectral devotion. When the truth of Miles’ dishonesty (he’s married with children) surfaces, Lucy’s heart is broken once again, but this time, she finds the strength to keep going, her resolve now tempered by Gregg’s steadfast ghostly love.
As years pass, the film floats through time; Anna grows up and moves on. The Captain gently chooses to withdraw, erasing himself from Lucy’s memory “like a dream,” in what may be the film’s most poignant, aching scene: his love so deep, he’s willing to accept absence for his beloved’s own peace. Lucy’s hair turns silver, and in a sequence glimmering after a journey marked by longing and finally peaceful fulfillment, she falls asleep for the final time, her spirit greeted once more by Captain Gregg, young and waiting, ready to make their way to the sea together, hand in hand, in a quiet, wordless exaltation. If I were to pick a film to nestle among my favorite tearjerkers, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir would be the one to flood me with tears, and truly make me “cry me an ocean” rather than just a river.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is as much about the textures of memory and loneliness as about romance. Mankiewicz’s direction bathes each moment in wistful yearning without ever tipping into sentimental schmaltz; Shamroy’s cinematography dips pillowy sunlight and candlelight in shadows, catching the moody cliffs and the billow of curtains in a house alive with spirit, literally. Alfred Newman’s score, especially that lilting main theme, laces every scene with longing. The film belongs to Tierney’s luminous, quietly fierce Lucy and Harrison’s blustering, battered Daniel, their performances humming with chemistry that defies easy explanation. It is complex, subtle, and challenging to describe in simple terms, devoted, at once gentle and wild at other times. Even Sanders, in a smaller but crucial role, leaves an oily yet wounded impression.
And while the silver screen version is the one most fondly revisited by cinephiles, the story flourished again in the television world much later. The Ghost & Mrs. Muir became a delightful ABC-CBS sitcom in the late 1960s, starring the graceful and radiant Hope Lange (winning two Emmys for her performance) as Mrs. Muir, her first name changed to Carolyn, and Edward Mulhare, who was a fabulous Captain indeed. Though more whimsical and sunny than spectral, the show echoed the original’s sense of possibility, humor, and “impossible” connection, bringing Gull Cottage’s magic to yet another generation of dreamers, skeptics, and romantics like me.
