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Romantic delirium becomes one woman’s preferred living space in The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. On a surface level the film seems to be obviously about a ghost haunting the seaside manor that a widow moves in to, and as they clash and learn to live with each other, they fall into some variation of love. Deeper still, and this is a tribute to Gene Tierney’s lovely performance, the movie takes on a sadder and somber tone – is the ghost real, or just a figment of Mrs. Muir’s imagination who she has dressed up in the personage of the former owner? The film never provides a clean-cut answer, but the duality of readings is a nice touch to what could be very sudsy material.
What’s most interesting, apart from the perfect score by Bernard Hermann and the by turns moody and romantic cinematography by Charles Lang Jr., is the titular heroine. A woman who feels nothing much in particular about her dead husband, or the very act that brought her daughter into the world. Instead, this gentile woman, a lady of leisure and breeding if ever there was one, wants a rough around the edges, salt of the earth type to swing into her life and teach her all about erotic awakenings and soothing his beastly edges. So there appears the ghost, a former sea captain played by Rex Harrison in full-on bombastic, profane yet sexy mode. It’s not hard to see why she would prefer to live out her days with this imagined man, particularly when things go south any time she tries to forge or create a real romance.
There’s a strong sense of romantic ache, isolation and sadness creeping in the edges and shadows of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. And that gentle quake is what gives the film a spark that makes it so unique. This wistful elegance combined with strong performances from Tierney and Harrison as a fire-and-ice couple make this worth watching. Ethereal love has never quite looked so good.
