The Uninvited (1944)

               While putting together the set of movies for this month I’ve been a little surprised at how few scary or at least serious films about ghosts have been produced by the major American studios over the years. I’m even including the direct-to-video boom periods of the 80’s and into the 90’s. VOD and digital filmmaking have lowered the bar to what gets sold as a ‘movie’ considerably in more recent years so there’s all sorts of nonsense in the flooded market now, but for the first handful of decades of the artform it seems spectral spooks were kind of rare. Since I’m not considering comedic ones like the ‘Topper’ movies or ‘Blythe Spirit’ I’m currently facing the daunting prospect of having to include an ‘Insidious’ movie in here to make all 31 days of the month. I have a few decades to go before then so hopefully I can come up with another, more interesting film. Maybe there’s a long-forgotten 80’s movie-of-the-week I can dig up.

              Ray Milland is an actor I should be more familiar with. I vaguely recognized his name during the opening credits to ‘The Uninvited’ but afterwards, when I was doing the little bit of research I do before unleashing a deluge of opining, I learned that for a while in the 1940’s and 50’s he was as big a leading man as any we’ve had. It was only a year after this movie that he won the Academy Award for his role in Billy Wilder’s ‘The Lost Weekend.’ The man was in ‘Dial “M” for Murder,’ ‘Love Story,’ and two different episodes of ‘The Love Boat.’ For at least a couple of years at Paramount he was the highest paid actor in the business. He ended up kind of coasting in the later years of his career, taking minor roles in smaller movies and tv shows as he saw fit, before passing at the age of 79. He’s perfectly fine in this movie.

              Another actor that might perk up some ears is Gail Russell, who did not have as pleasant a life as Milland. This was her third movie role and her first major one. She’d been signed to a long-term contract by Paramount in 1942 when she was just 18. It was reported that during the filming of this movie she would have frequent emotional breakdowns, often crying on set, and it was apparently difficult to get the required length and amount of takes with her. Such stories are all hand-me-downs of hearsay decades after the fact, so I’ll just say that being a woman that young when first eaten by the studio system is more than enough to break anyone. Supposedly a crew member suggested to her that drinking would help calm her nerves between takes. She was dogged with drunk-driving arrests and blown acting jobs for the rest of her life before she drank herself to death at the age of 36. She’s very young and stiff in this movie.

              The rest of the actors are basically fine. The only other notable actor in the movie is Ruth Hussey, who was outstanding as the least-famous corner of the love-square in ‘The Philadelphia Story.’ She’s not given much to do here and frankly her role should have been beefed up into the main character, but we’ll get back to that. Cornelia Otis Skinner plays something of an antagonist in the movie; she was far more well known at the time as a writer and stage performer. Alan Napier has a minor role as a doctor, he’s probably best known today for playing Alfred in the 1966 “Batman” tv show. They are all completely adequate performers.

              The script seems like it passed through a lot of different hands before production, made up as it is of various scenes that tie together well enough but jerk back and forth awkwardly between po-faced serious and corny comedic tones. It’s also almost a full 100 minutes long with far too much plot shoved in. The first credited screenwriter is Dodie Smith, a British novelist best known for writing I Capture the Castle and One-Hundred and One Dalmatians. She took a first pass during a part of her career where she brushed up against Hollywood. The final version seems to have been extensively rewritten by Frank Partos, a staff writer at Paramount who turned out some well-regarded but mostly forgotten noirs. Direction was by Lewis Allen, who had a decent couple of decades in Hollywood turning out a steady stream of mid-budget movies without producing anything particularly memorable. During the 50’s he did a lot of well-regarded television work, including the Frank Sinatra-led ‘Suddenly’ in 1954. He would later direct episodes of ‘The Rifleman,’ ‘Route 66,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘The Fugitive,’ and tons of others.

              It was released to critical and commercial success, being one of the highest-grossing movies of the year. It had a small amount of scandal when questions were raised about some possible lesbian-coding of one of the characters, which I’ll admit is there if you want to look for it but doesn’t seem to have been that important to the movie’s themes. What strikes me about the contemporaneous reviews is how surprised all the critics were that the ghosts in the movie were real and thus how scary the movie was. I have seen the movie and at no point did it occur to me that the movie was even trying to be scary. A little tense, maybe, certainly mysterious, but if I had to go through the movie scene-by-scene again I’m not entirely sure I’d be able to identify any moments that were meant to frighten the audience. I think we’re now so far removed and film content has moved on so much that nothing here codes as scary to a modern audience.

              The main problem I have with the movie is not that I didn’t find it frightening, I don’t think anything before about 1960 is ever going to give me goosebumps, the problem is that because of all the drafts and revisions and ideas put in and taken out and rewritten it’s both way too complicated and way too simple. The contradiction comes from there being this fairly convoluted history to the haunted house and some of the characters that gets unraveled over the course of the movie, meanwhile the characters that are actually on screen don’t do much more than wander from room to room having conversations. There’s even a plot point where one set of characters takes several minutes traveling to rescue another character, then it turns out that they’ve already left for the place everyone just came from, so now they have to go back to where they just were. Much of the movie is taken up by logistics.

              To the premise, such as it is. A brother and sister in their mid-30’s, Rick and Pamela Fitzgerald as played by Milland and Hussey, are wandering around the coastal areas of Cornwall on vacation when they come across a deserted house. Their dog chases a squirrel inside and while retrieving it they fall in love with the place and decide to make an offer. They go to the owner’s house and meet his granddaughter, Stella Meredith, played by Gail Russell. She tries to tell them the house isn’t for sale but then her grandfather, Commander Beech, arrives and instantly accepts their low-ball offer. He does warn them that others have complained about odd noises and sights at the house, but they don’t care.

              The Fitgerald’s are soon moved in and loving the place, except for a studio up on the top floor that seems to always be cold and depressing. We see a bouquet of flowers instantly wilting in the room at like fifteen minutes in so at least the movie lets us know early that earnest spookums is afoot. While they’re in the room they see Stella looking up at them from the edge of the cliffs outside.

It's not an unattractive movie at times.

              The next day Stella apologizes to Rick for staring, explaining that her mother died in the house when she was three and that’s why she didn’t want to sell it. Her father died soon after her mother, so all she has left for family is her grandfather. It also turns out that she’s never been allowed to set foot in the house since her mother’s passing. Oh, and Rick is interested in her so they’re dating now. It technically takes a couple of scenes for the actual courting to begin but that’s what’s happening. The movie very carefully establishes that Stella is 20, as was Russell, and although it doesn’t ever specify Rick’s age Milland himself was 37 at the time of filming, which seems about right. 37 and 20 is not necessarily a creepy age gap, but Russell plays Stella as very young, and from what’s on screen it’s very easy to assume that Rick is the first adult man besides her grandfather to ever pay attention to her. Not super-solid relationship foundations, is what I’m saying. Incidental romances in movies of this era are almost never any good. They have a tendency to want to end films with everyone paired off, even the side characters, and usually don’t feel the need to justify how anyone ended up together.

              Rick leaves for a three-week trip to London to get the rest of their stuff and comes back to find that Pamela has not only learned that the house is haunted, but she’s also gotten pretty blasé about it. The first night he’s back Rick is woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a woman sobbing. He’s about to go investigate when Pamela tells him not to bother, she’s already looked any number of times and has never found anything. Rick is appropriately skeptical, as he will be for most of the rest of the movie.

              During the next forty-five minutes or so the ghostly backstories are slowly dribbled out between scenes of people getting chills, feeling unexpectedly depressed, animals and maids refusing to go upstairs or ‘spend another night inside this house,’ some mild courting, all ways to shuffle people around the five or six sets they’ve built. Turns out that Stella’s dad was a painter of some ability, as evidenced by the huge pictures all over the place of Stella’s mother Mary. Thus the upstairs studio. We’re grimly informed that he also had a ‘foreign’ model by the name of Carmel, who everyone instantly admits he had an affair with. Mary’s mother supposedly died by accidentally falling from the cliffs behind the house. The clues as they’re uncovered start to point to her actually being murdered by Carmel in a jealous rage, but then! it turns out that actually Stella is Carmel’s biological daughter, a result of the affair. Mary was running to the cliff to throw toddler Stella off of it in a fit of jealous rage when Carmel stopped her, accidentally causing Mary to fall to her death. Carmel caught pneumonia during all of this and slowly died from the deliberate neglect of Mary’s maid, who grew up to run a weird psych ward and is crazy herself, and it turns out that the house actually has two ghosts in it, and Stella gets shipped off to the weird psych ward and they have to rescue her but she’s actually at the house and tries to throw herself off of a cliff and there’s a séance and then Rick laughs at a ghost and his sister Pamela marries the local doctor who she had a grand total of three scenes with, the end.

              It’s not bad by any means but it’s such a standard 1940’s movie, with no actual interiority of characters and such blatant ‘it’s time for a comedy scene’ schtick, that I bounced off of it with no real emotional connection. It’s not scary, it’s not tense, it’s not that pretty to look at, and the dialogue is merely functional. It also has the incorrect main character as Rick is, by far, the least interesting of the three main leads. I have to note as well that the amount this movie doesn’t care about Stella, who the entire plot revolves around, is startling. She has two different ghosts fighting over her, her birth mother Carmel is trying to protect her while her adopted mother Mary has been trying to kill her, and yet most of her dialogue is just meaningless replies to Rick’s endless banter. She finds out that her birth mother is actually this model that she’s kind of heard rumors about a couple of times in the last two decades and has never seen a picture of and by the way this means that her life is a lie, her grandfather has been deliberately deceiving her for her entire actual life, her adopted mother tried to kill her and her birth mother was murdered by a friend of the family she’s known for years, all this heavy, heavy shit, and her reaction to all of this is contained within exactly one short scene and is simply to be happy that she understands why the one ghost feels nice and the other doesn’t. Emotional scars instantly healed, she’s all ready to get married now to someone she’s known for a couple of months.

              I would have preferred following Pamela. She’s the reason they bought the house, feeling an instant connection to the place. This never gets addressed. She spent three entire weeks alone in an actually for-reals haunted mansion and seemed to cope just fine. She probably got up to all sorts of shenanigans, bravely wandering around in an empty house looking for the sobbing woman, chasing after the dog chasing after phantoms, maybe she visits a little antique shop in town and hears some gossip, all sorts of possibilities, but nothing is ever shown or even referenced. It’s mentioned in casual dialogue that Rick is a music critic for a newspaper and that their parents were well off so technically we know where her money’s coming from, but how does she spend her time? We never get told or shown, she just waits in suspended animation between scenes until Rick needs her. I think a better spin on this material would have been Pamela trying to figure out the secrets of the house on her own while Rick wanders around getting into weird drama with that girl who’s way too young for him and her weird family. There is a séance scene in the movie that Pamela’s technically present for but I can’t remember if she even has any lines. She’s the one who believed in the ghosts first, she should have been on top of that shit.

              Rick was the safe, obvious choice of a male lead, and despite Milland’s best efforts he’s just boring. He’s a frustrated composer making do as a critic, so he gets to namedrop some famous musicians while doodling around on a piano to impress the almost-child he’s pursuing. It’s interesting to note that the little ditty he says he wrote for her, “Stella by Starlight,” went on to become a well-known jazz standard. He performatively scoffs at the ghost stuff early on, waving it away as just noises, but then he gets wrapped up in uncovering Stella’s past. Not even as a ploy to get into her pants, just in a kind of dogged but unfocused way that never really gets justified, he’s simply concerned about her in a general way. The rest of his emotions and motivations are left just as vague. The only arc he gets is that he doesn’t believe in ghosts at the beginning then does at the end. A couple of people who covered up a murder are still at large and consequence-free at the end of everything but all the main characters are nicely paired off so we can fade out on a happy ending.

              More than anything else I am genuinely surprised that it was considered notable in 1944 that a ghost movie had ghosts in it. There must have been some grand cultural understanding where it always turned out that the ghost or the phantom or the spirit or whatever had some kind of rational explanation or was due to criminal shenanigans. I admit I made a wrong guess about 20 minutes in, figuring that Stella was faking the ghost noises to get them out of the house before it’d be revealed that there’s a REAL ghost in the house, but no, read that one completely wrong. It’s not like we don’t still have movies and shows where the ghosts aren’t real, the various ‘Scooby-Doo’ properties are still fairly culturally load-bearing, but it can’t really have taken a good three decades of film as a mass-audience art form before they featured real ghosts, can it? They had double-exposure and cheesecloth before then, they had the technology. Maybe they saved the real ghosts for the comedies out of some kind of vestiges of Victorian morality? Either way I hope the movies start getting even a little bit spooky from here on out.