The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

A perfect work of Hollywood's dream factory, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir sees director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, screenwriter Philip Dunne, composer Bernard Herrmann, and stars Gene Tierney, Rex Harrison, and George Sanders all doing first-rate work. Tierney gives her warmest and most enchanting performance as a headstrong young widow named Lucy Muir, who leaves her husband's family in London to seek a quieter, more independent life with her young daughter (an adorable 9-year-old Natalie Wood) and her loyal maid, Martha (Edna Best in a wonderful supporting turn). She finds a large, secluded seaside home called Gull Cottage that seems just perfect, but the estate agent (nervously comical Robert Coote) warns her of its reputation for being haunted by the spirit of the Sea Captain who built it and died there. Lucy has no patience for ghosts and refuses to be scared off like everyone else who's tried to rent the place. This infuriates the salty specter, Captain Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison giving a career-best performance), who, after numerous attempts to spook her incorporeally, tries a more direct approach. He soon discovers he likes the young woman's spunk and they agree to share the place.

The film is not only wonderfully romantic it's also quite sexy, in that Lucy and Captain Gregg are able to do things that would not be conceivable for typical screen characters to do at this point in the studio system under the Hayes Code. Because the Captain is a spirit, there's no chance of physical relations occurring, even though the Ghost and Mrs. Muir share the master bedroom. When funds get tight, the Captain challenges Lucy to help him write his seafaring life story, which he believes will bring her significant wealth. During this collaboration, the two fall in love. That's when George Sanders enters the picture, playing a hacky children's book author who charms Lucy, offering her the chance to fall in love with a man of flesh and blood. But real human beings can disappoint, especially when they're played by George Sanders!

Mankiewicz comes into his own in this, his fourth film as a director. With more than twenty-five produced screenplays under his belt, the younger Mankiewicz's career had already eclipsed that of his older brother, legendary screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane, Dinner at Eight, The Pride of the Yankees), and had become an acclaimed producer scoring Best Picture Oscar nominations for The Philadelphia Story in 1940 and Woman of the Year in 1942. His first feature, the gothic period drama Dragonwyck (1946), which also starred Tierney as a feisty young woman who, longing for a different life, moves to a spooky old house and becomes involved with its crusty inhabitant, has more than a few similarities to The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. But the two films operate at entirely different levels.

Not only are the performances in this movie exceptional, but The Ghost and Mrs. Muir epitomizes how inimitable a studio picture can be when every department delivers its best possible work. The screenplay is by Philip Dunne, known for penning well-regarded historical and romantic dramas like The Last of the Mohicans, Stanley and Livingstone, and How Green Was My Valley (for which he was Oscar-nominated). Dunne adapts the 1945 novel by Josephine Leslie (who published it under the pseudonym of R.A. Dick) taking the type of necessary liberties to transform a novel into a film. These changes include reducing the story's time frame down from decades to a single year, cutting one of Mrs. Muir's children out entirely, etc. Dunne assumed Mankiewicz would rewrite the script to give the still fledgling director more of a feeling of authorship. But the sharp, confident Mankiewicz knew a good piece of work when he read it, and he didn't change a thing, apart from penning a few comical lines for Sanders.

The art direction by George Davis and Richard Day is breathtaking. They built Gull Cottage for real in Monterey California, doubling quite effectively for the seaside village of Whitecliff in Dorset England. The set they built is no mere facade for exteriors. Several interior sets, including the master bedroom, were constructed within this enormous structure so that scenes in which the Ghost and Mrs. Muir look out the windows and grand French doors onto the cliffs and sea could be played with the actors on the actual location, not standing in front of rear-screen projection in the studio. Considering how slow the film stocks of the day were, and how bright the California sun is, cinematographer Charles Lang (The Uninvited, Frenchman's Creek, Desert Fury) must have needed an incredible amount of lights to balance the exposure between the bedroom and the beach. It pays off. These impressive images don't come across like similar shots in Citizen Kane, in that they don't draw attention to themselves, but they help convey how much the characters love the location.

Another creative collaborator inspired by the location was composer Bernard Herrmann, who came to Hollywood with Orson Welles to make Citizen Kane. His score for Kane six year's prior won him an Oscar nomination. but it was the music for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir that Herrmann considered the finest score he ever did for a movie. His music reflects the way the waves roll into the shore and pull back with the current, the strings swell and sore back and forth building and building as the sea overtakes the sand, only to retreat with the changing tide. It's a romantic soundtrack that conveys a feeling of melancholic longing.

Everything is cut beautifully together by editor Dorothy Spencer to create that rarest of entities, a perfect film. It's whimsical, touching, elegant, understated, dreamlike, truthful, and utterly charming. Far more romantic than its contemporary literary adaptations like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, it's imposing in its production but light in its execution. Mankiewicz's deft touch favors subtlety over melodrama when dealing with material more along the lines of magical realism than a supernatural ghost story. The picture can be viewed over and over because we enjoy spending time with all of its characters so much, even the nasty, silly, and disappointing ones. It's almost what we would call today a "hang-out movie," but in the end, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is a romance through and through. The fact that one character is alive and one is dead, becomes a minor detail when handled cinematically.