• The Ghost & Mrs. Muir

4/18/24 (Thurs)

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1947 fantasy was based on a female-authored book released two years earlier. I knew the title from the short-lived TV series back in the 1960s, but that played the situation for laughs. The film takes a more romantic approach.

It is around 1900 in the UK countryside. Lucy Muir, a feisty young widow determined to get away from her late husband’s family, finds a charming suburban home with only one problem – it is allegedly haunted. Dismissing the realtor’s warning, she moves in with her young daughter and housekeeper. She soon discovers that a ghost does in fact reside there, a sea captain who is irritated to no end that his accidental death has been branded a suicide. He wants to make his property a home for retired seamen and has played tricks to frighten away all those who think of living there. Lucy, however, is not giving up a perfect house so easily and refuses to be cowed. Impressed with her gumption, the ghost agrees to limit his appearances to the bedroom and keep himself invisible to others. Naturally they fall in love, but the ghostly divide keeps them separate. He is wary when she is wooed by a slimy author of children’s books, and his warnings to her prove prescient when the man is revealed to have a wife and children. She remains alone as the years pass and gradually ages (great makeup). When she finally dies, her fellow ghost is there to escort her, now young and beautiful again, into the next world.

The film benefits from a smart and witty script. Though written by an American, it is set in the UK and retains an English sense of humor. A good number of jokes stem from the ghost’s salty language rubbing off on the prim Lucy (Her: “How in blazes do you want me to talk?” Him: “That’s better!”), and the book he dictates for her – talk about ghost writers – surprises the publisher for its masculine tone. She tells the ghost that life is too short to bicker, and he responds, “Your life may be short, madam. I have unlimited time at my disposal.” I loved this exchange between them:

Lucy: “Daniel, what did your aunt do when you ran away to sea?”

Captain: “Oh, probably thank heaven there was no one around to fill her house with mongrel puppies and track mud on her carpets.”

Lucy: “Did she write to you?”

Captain: “Every Sunday for seven years. I was at sea when she died. It was the year I got me mate’s ticket. What are you thinking about, Lucia?”

Lucy: “I’m thinking how lonely she must have felt with her clean carpets.”

The script can be poetic. When the ghost decides to sneak away from the sleeping Lucy in order to stop being a burden on her, he mutters, “How you’d have loved the North Cape and the fjords in the midnight sun… to sail across the reef at Barbados, where the blue water turns to green… to the Falklands, where a southerly gale rips the whole sea white! What we’ve missed, Lucia… what we’ve both missed.”

The film has inevitably aged in places, but its memorable characters and literate dialogue lift it beyond other period pieces. Gene Tierney is wonderful as Mrs. Muir, and Rex Harrison is his usual cantankerous self (repeated the next year in Unfaithfully Yours), as if prepping for Henry Higgins ten years later. Also of note were George Sanders as the two-timing author and a very good Edna Best as the practical-minded housekeeper. Robert Coote, Harrison’s mate in My Fair Lady, is fun as the realtor, and I learned afterwards that the child was played by Natalie Wood. I’m surprised this has not been adapted into a modern version.