The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

(London and Wytcliff England; roughly 1900-1947)
IMDb

Fantasy romance based on the novel by R. A. Dick. A year after the death of her husband, Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) takes her child and maid and moves from her in-laws residence in London, to a quite seaside village. There she is rather taken by a house that has become the bain of a local real estate company. It seems sense the place first came on the market no tenet has stayed longer then one night, convinced the house to be haunted. The willful Mrs. Muir decides to move in anyway, and quickly becomes acquainted with the resident spook, the late Captain Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison). All things considered Mrs. Muir takes this development rather well, and her and Captain quickly enter into a teasing, even flirty relationship characterized by lite banter. Having brought up the banter I need to mention the dialogue in this film, as it kind of bugged me. The scene in which Lucy and the Captain have there first prolonged conversation is very plot-point to plot-point, and didn't feel natural, in fact I found it quite stilted. It went from things like, 'you're a ghost?', 'I'm a ghost', how'd you die?', 'accident, not suicide', 'this is my house!', 'no, this is my house'. It just seemed so formula and uninspired I though it was going to ruin the movie for me, as it over expeditioned the whole set up, fortunately it improved somewhat and there was viewing compensation available, such as the chemistry between Tierney and Harrison.

Gene Tierney's performance seemed to improve with the film. Early one the Lucy role is rather limited, there was not much to be done with it, it was bound to be kind of predictable. In fact the budding romance between her character and the cynical children's author played by George Sanders, seemed mostly non sensible. Sanders character came on heavily as kind of a heel, in fact he proved in the end to be a pretty despicable fellow, which made Lucy's enamoration with him seem odd and out of character for what would have been a fairly liberated women for her time. All the other character seemed to see through him, why couldn't Lucy. In fact the whole episode only serves to validate the Captains views about frivolous, naive, femininity. Perhaps the writers thought the ghosts character needed to have some sort of a solid victory in the relationship, given that he quickly gave in to having mortally permanent residents in 'his house.' Harrison has most of the good stuff in the picture however, though I must say post-Sanders Lucy gets a few semi-poignant scenes towards the end.

I can see why this story's concept has rang so well with so many, especially women over the years. It's romantic yet chaste, fancifully but tragic all at the same time. One of the networks even managed to string out its proceedings for two seasons as a television series from 1968-70, though they moved the location to Main under the widely held assumption that Americans won't watch a foregone set programme (save MASH) in half hour time allotments. Seriously, name another American sitcome set abroad. I the end I didn't like this movie as much as I'd hope to, though its still a nice little production.