The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

Mankiewicz's gentlest film, using the ghost-story shape not to frighten but to talk about loneliness. The young widow Lucia Muir escapes her husband's family and moves with her daughter and maid to Gull Cottage by the sea. The house holds the ghost of its former owner, the dead seaman Captain Gregg, who tries to drive her out. When she does not leave, an odd partnership forms: with her money gone, the captain dictates his own seafaring memoirs to her and the book sells. The film's whole strength is that the relationship cannot happen. At one point the captain chooses to disappear so that she can have her own life, and persuades her it was all a dream. Gene Tierney plays Lucia, Rex Harrison the captain, and George Sanders the writer who deceives her. Bernard Herrmann wrote the score, and it is counted among his own favourites of his work. The final scene is one of the calmest deaths in cinema, built without a single element of horror. Who it is for: viewers who like classical Hollywood melodrama and Herrmann's music. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a ghost film. Nothing in it is eerie; it is a love story, and its middle stretch noticeably sags.