Ghost Story (1974)

               I was all smug and ready to enjoy yet another Criterion-approved film with the 1973 classic ‘Don’t Look Now.’ Then I started watching it. Then I started hating it. Then I bothered to scan a plot synopsis and figured out that it’s yet another movie tagged as being a ghost story but instead it’s just your standard meditation on grief, this time with aggressively discordant editing. I was even looking forward to Donald Sutherland’s sex scene, I’ve read so much about it. So I tossed that aside, rooted around a little wider than usual, and then this movie happened to me.

Drink in that 70's color palette.

              Not to be confused with the American movie of the same name from seven years later (also on the schedule), this is a British film, the viewing experience of which is entirely overshadowed by every facet of its backstory and production. A lot of interesting people were involved in making this, which didn’t translate into a good movie. Behind the camera there’s the director Stephen Weeks. If you’ve never heard of him before I’ll give you a little hint as to why with his entire entry in Wikipedia: “Stephen Weeks is a British film director, writer, and producer. He started making films when was 16 and made his featured debut aged 22 with I, Monster.” That’s it, that’s the whole thing. His only movie the general public might be familiar with is ‘Sword of the Valiant,’ a retelling of the Green Knight myth starring Trevor Howard, Peter Cushing, John Rhys-Davies, Sean Connery, and Miles O’Keefe. According to reviews it also sucks. The screenplay has three credited writers, Weeks himself, Philip Norman (not that one), and Rosemary Sutcliffe, beloved British children’s author of the Eagle of the Ninth series. Despite a very proud title card at the very end of the film proclaiming that it was “Made entirely on location by Stephen Weeks Company Limited Penhow Castle, Gwent, UK,” which happens to be the restored castle in Wales where Weeks lived, most of the movie was shot at various locations in India, mostly at Bangalore Palace in Karnataka.

              The cast is genuinely interesting as well. There are three main characters and two minor ones and all of their actors are noteworthy in one way or another. The lead of the movie is a young man named Talbot, played with a grating awkwardness by Larry Dann. He was in a bunch of the ‘Carry On’ films, and for those familiar with UK tv he was Sgt. Peters in 227 episodes of “The Bill.” Talbot accompanies two of his old university schoolmates to visit an old empty country house in 1930’s England. The man organizing the weekend is McFayden, played by Murray Melvin. Do an image search, you’ll recognize him. I can’t remember exactly where I saw him first, there’s every chance it was in an episode of “Jonathan Creek.” The third is Duller, played by Vivian MacKerrell. If you don’t recognize the name you’ll recognize the film character he inspired, to the point where the movie quoted direct lines from his diary: Withnail, from ‘& I’ fame. The two minor characters are a brother and sister duo from the past that Talbot glimpses due to supernatural forces, Robert and Sophy. Robert is played by Leigh Lawson, who has plenty of credits but who is probably most famous for being married to Twiggy. Sophy is played by, of all people, Marianne Faithfull. Yes, that one. When I realized it was genuinely her in this movie I was dead sure that the Phillip Norman credited in the screenplay was the famous rock critic one, but no, it’s just a kind of coincidence.

              About the only nice thing I’ll say about the movie is that reading up on it made me add a somewhat similar French movie, ‘Celine and Julie Go Boating,’ to my list. That one looks interesting.

              Before I get into anything involving the plot I want to talk about how the movie looks. It looks awful. As in the physical images as captured on the negative and converted into a series of still images to be projected at 24 frames a second all look terrible. It doesn’t seem to be the transfer I watched, even the original trailer has the same faults. There’s a lack of sharpness and a general muddy look to everything. Nothing was lit artistically or even properly, it seems to have relied on a lot of natural lighting when that was clearly insufficient. I lack the technical expertise to tell just from looking what kind of film it was shot it or what steps in the development process might have been mishandled. They have some nice locations, and the period garb seems to be of perfectly fine quality, so they weren’t completely broke. The camera work is generally fine, but both the scene composition and framing are often blunt and clumsy. Sometimes it’s hard to even understand what information is trying to be conveyed by what’s on the screen.

              This movie limps to a length of 87 minutes by taking about an hour of very unfunny between-the-wars comedy of manners material and randomly shoving in parts of a somewhat saucy 1980’s Channel Four period melodrama. From what I can tell there are no narrative or even thematic links between the two parts of the movie, the only connection on screen between the present and the past being how Talbot randomly flits from one to another. To give you some idea of how disconnected everything is, I’m only reasonably sure which dead person is the resident ghost.

              To the plot, such as it is. A man named McFayden invites two of his old university acquaintances to spend a weekend at an uninhabited country estate. It’s made clear that the three of them aren’t really friends and that the two who were invited only accepted out of a mixture of politeness and, in Talbot’s case, a genuine inability to read social cues. Near the end of the movie it’s revealed that instead of his father taking temporary possession of the estate during a sale, McFayden has instead recently inherited it himself. It turns out there have long been unsavory rumors about the house’s history and rumors that it was haunted. He therefore invited a couple of people he knew but didn’t particularly care about to scout the place out. Talbot was invited because of his scientific background while their other classmate Duller was invited because of his long-standing interest in supernatural investigations.

              The weekend goes badly, as the three upper class twits are generally useless with no staff and have pretty differing personalities. McFayden and Duller are increasingly rude to Talbot over the course of the weekend, to the point where he finally starts to stand up for himself. This, coupled with a complete inability to detect anything haunted, causes Duller to just leave the movie at minute 55. He’s out of the film and has no further impact on the story. Thanks, Withnail. The two left make it another night before deciding they’re not having any fun either and they should leave as well. Then a doll kills Talbot and sneaks into a suitcase in McFayden’s car to apparently kill him later.

              While the above annoying plotline is happening (and it is as riveting as it sounds, just scene after scene of minor characters from a sub-par episode of ‘Poirot’ insulting each other about jam sandwiches), Talbot keeps slipping into quasi-dreams of the past. This is never explained, by the way. There is nothing either said or implied about Talbot or the characters in the past that would explain why whatever is inhabiting the house has focused on him. The others are right there, heck sometimes he’ll have his little strange interlude in the middle of a conversation with them and after the flashback they’ll continue without missing a beat.

This is as good as it ever looks.

              There’s some slight visual cleverness in that sometimes during these flashbacks Talbot will be physically present in the scene but completely undetectable to the spirits of the past. The creepiest section of the movie is when Talbot is suddenly back in time in an insane asylum, still dressed in his orange striped pajamas as he wanders around looking at olde-timey crazy people. This attempt at style is more than offset by the seemingly random nature of the flashbacks. There is no consistency between what triggers the flashbacks, or reveries, or whatever they are. Sometimes Talbot will be alone, sometimes he’ll be in the middle of a meal with the others. Sometimes time passes while he’s experiencing the flashback, sometimes another character will finish a sentence he started when Talbot was first flung back. The editing makes it clear when he’s witnessing something, cutting back to his face for the reactions, but sometimes he’ll be physically transported back, sometimes he’ll be left where he was but somehow still able to witness everything. I don’t require a stringent set of rules for spookiness, but we need to be able to tell that it’s intentional somehow, or that there’s some kind of point to what’s happening. Talbot just gets info dumped on by ghosts every once in a while with random methodology.

              There’s also the infuriating way people react to his supernatural shenanigans, or rather the way they don’t. Screams they hear in the middle of the night can just be brushed off at nightmares, fair enough, but there’s a creepy little doll that menaces him throughout the movie and no matter how oddly it causes him to behave the others don’t seem to care much. At one point Talbot screeches loudly and throws the doll from a second story balcony, crashing to the floor below right in front of McFayden eating breakfast. He is, at most, mildly interested. When McFayden admitted he’d brought Talbot along for ulterior motives I was sure it was going to be revealed that he’d somehow known of Talbot’s susceptibility to spiritual forces beforehand and thus didn’t want to get in the way of his experiment, but no, he’s just a prick who doesn’t care about him. It’s possibly some kind of commentary on the class snobbery thing that the movie is doing, but if so it’s badly done to the point of incomprehensibility. A lot of contemporary reviews derided it for falling back on well-worn storytelling tropes about the fallibility of the upper class, something that was apparently all over the place in British media at the time. I guess it was more obvious back then. I’m aware it was a thing, and while I haven’t seen enough of it to always spot it I’m very willing to believe the set of cliches in this movie aren’t done very well.

              Before I get to the ghost part of this ghost story I really want to emphasize what an unpleasant character Talbot it. There’s a general air of tweedy shallowness and inability to read social tells to him, which would normally make him sympathetic. Doubly so considering that his two schoolmates are, on paper at least, just as bad. McFayden has a kind of wasted superiority to him, like if the British Empire itself became a person then contracted an extended bout of tuberculosis. Duller is just an asshole, rude and bullying. He’s deeply unpleasant to Talbot, willing to bad-talk him behind his back and deeply uninterested in anything he might have to say or do.

              Yet I hate Talbot more than the two of them together. Because as unpleasant as they are they’re not shown on-screen to be proto-incels. The movie goes to some lengths to establish that Talbot would be considered a sexual deviant at the time of the movie and likely at the time of filming. And I know society has rightfully normalized a lot of things that were previously considered taboo, but even constrained as they are by time and place his actions are just consistently creepy. As the trio is driving to the estate they pass a girl on a bike. Talbot turns to the two in the front seat and, with tongue visibly out and licking his lips, says, “I say, did you see that little thing running along on her bicycle?” They correctly ignore him. Later on they find that Talbot brought along some photos of naked women for the weekend hidden in a book and have a laugh about it. Several times over the course of the movie when we cut to Talbot waking up in bed the photos are lying out next to him, which implies some things. One night he goes to the local pub and as he’s leaving spies a woman standing under a streetlight by herself. He smiles and starts to wander over then veers sharply away when the man she was waiting for turns up. I don’t trust the guy, is my point. You’d think this would tie in with the ghostly flashbacks, considering that it focuses on Marianne Faithfull in fairly low-cut dresses, and it kinda does but mostly doesn’t.

              Might as well talk about the ghost stuff. Near the end McFayden drops a couple of casual lines about a distant aunt or something who came to a bad end, but it’s never really addressed in the present timeline what actually happened, so here’s my best guess. First flashback opens on a woman named Sophy talking with her maid. Turns out she had a fight with someone named Robert last night and he’s decided she needs to go stay someplace else for a bit. None of this is spelled out until the end in a very unsatisfactory way, so I’ll just clarify from the start: Sophy and Robert are brother and sister and both desperately want to have sex with each other slash have been having sex with each other, it’s never clarified. Sophy’s down for it, Robert’s uncomfortable with the idea so has her shipped off to an insane asylum. While she’s there he bangs local floozies. She’s shown as being locked in a room with another patient and desperate to escape. There’s a completely inexplicable scene where the two (2) entire staff members of the entire asylum decide to burn the place down with everyone inside for the insurance money, and then a scene later they decide not to. Sophy’s maid turns up with a bribe to get her released. While one staff member goes to confer with the other the maid steals the keys and lets Sophy out. Instead of getting thanked she’s instantly attacked by Sophy’s roommate. Sophy, in turn, ignores this, grabs the keys, lets everyone out, and runs off home. The inmates kill one of the staff members in a very unmemorable way, I guess the other escapes. When she gets home Sophy, now apparently actually mad, kisses Robert and stabs him at the same time. As he dies Robert stares at Sophy’s old doll, the same one that’s been stalking Talbot.

              And that’s it. Oh, what happened to Sophy, you ask? Is she in the doll? One hallucinatory sequence where Talbot in white makeup dances with an equally made-up Sophy only to have it turn into a doll during an edit would imply that, but I don’t think it’s ever stated how or when she died. It’s also completely unclear why the doll killed Talbot, or why it then chose to crawl into Talbot’s suitcase in the back of McFayden’s car, other than allowing the movie to show a little doll hand creep out of it right before the credits to try to squeeze one last scare out of the audience.

              I feel the need to stress how deeply unsatisfying this movie is. It kind of posits questions, then seems confused at the idea of providing answers. I can’t get mad at the basic structure, the idea of three people going to a strange house and one of them getting pulled into the past to witness a grisly murder is utterly standard. The inability to even gesture towards a reason or a mechanism or any kind of connection between the present characters and the ghostly past is such a basic failing of the movie I’m kind of shocked. The movie was made between continents on a shoestring budget, so it’s entirely possible quite a lot was lost between the script and the screen due to lack of funds. Dropped shots, excised scenes, actor unavailability (given the legendary drunken antics of Vivian MacKerrell it’s not inconceivable that his character’s abrupt exit was written in just to get him off the set), there could be any number of reasons for the way the two sections of the movie simply do not tie together, but I’m not particularly interested in ferreting them out. I owe Herk Harvey a profound apology for besmirching the technical aspects of ‘Carnival of Souls.’ The audio dubbing might have been a bit subpar but in terms of scene construction, conveyance of themes, and basic information that film is head and shoulders above this one. It was also better lit and always in focus. I have some famously terrible movies coming up but I’m expecting to enjoy at least some of them due to their displays of sheer excess. This movie has nothing to offer and I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone.