THE UNINVITED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 297, 2 March 1945, Page 16

THE UNINVITED

(Paramount)

HOST stories fascinate me, Not because I believe in the jolly things (I have never had occasion either to believe or disbelieve) but because

they are such a distinctive literary form and their technique is so interesting to study. A good ghost story must be the hardest of all-stories to write; especially the short ghost story, since it must achieve its effect with such economy of effort and within such a restricted compass. It is almost always better when it merely suggests the presence of nameless horrors that when it opens the cupboard door and reveals the skeleton inside. If you want an example of that, compare The Monkey’s Paw by W. W. Jacobs with almost any chain-clanking shocker of the early Victorian or German schools. But the very limitations which, when successfully surmounted, make the written ghost story a work of art are too much for the stage and film producer. For one thing this type of story evokes a peculiarly personal response; its chills are meant to be relished in secret by the individual reader. The film producer, on the other hand, aims at a mass reaction. For another thing, it is the nature of the camera that it does not merely hint at things but shows them. * * * OR these reasons, then, neither the cinema nor the stage has ever produced a perfect ghost story and probably never will, whereas literature has produced several. But Paramount’s The Uninvited (based on Dorothy Macardle’s novel, Uneasy Freehold) comes nearer to the ideal than any I have seen. It does this primarily because it genuinely is a ghost story; that is to say, it accepts the supernatural, takes it for granted. It does not, in the last scene, explain away the hauntings as being caused by wind in the chimney, or rats in the wainscoting: the efforts to keep the new owners out of the old house are not shown to have been engineered by Axis agents, crazy scientists, or demented family retainers. It is almost. the first film to my knowledge that has ever done this. We have of course had plenty of films of the Dracula, were-wolf, or Mummy’s Ghost type: silly, heavy-handed affairs most of them, based on old superstitions about the "un-dead," and attempting to shock the audience by mechanical devices and heavy make-up. And we have had others,

rather better, dealing with hypnotism, demonic possession, and abnormal psychology: films like The Seventh Victim and Cat People. But in these cases the horrors result from living, if not natural, causes. In The Uninvited, however, the ghosts are unquestionably dead -- for very nearly the first time in cinema history. Here we are truly in the realm of the supernatural: a realm which may or may not exist but which is. certainly exciting territory to explore from the security of a theatre-seat, if you have a taste for such adventures. * * * NDEED, as an account of the malign influence of an earth-bound spirit on. a young girl and the intervention of a benign ghost on her behalf, this story belongs to the samé school as Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw, though of cdurse it is not in the same literary class. The spooks which haunt the house on the Cornish coast purchased by a young composer from London (Ray Milland) and his sister (Ruth Hussey), are not of the head-carrying, bone-rattling sort. They manifest themselves in the fashion approved by the best ghost story writers, as nothing more substantial than a deadly cold which chills to the core those who enter a certain room, as an over-powering scent of mimosa, or as a malignant force which withers flowers, snuffs out candle-flames, and gives cats and dogs the jitters. Certainly as they grow emboldened the disembodied inhabitants of the place do become visible as a writhing mist. But again, it is a sign of this film’s close affinity with the. best literary models that its finest effects are achieved, not by the actual ghostly hocus-pocus, but by the manner in which the whole atmosphere of the tale invests innocent, everyday events and objects with horrid portent. Thus a window bursting open in the storm brings you much closer to jumping out of your skin with fright than does the gathering of the spectral mist on the stairs; while the scene of a dog chasing a squirrel across the echoing rooms of the empty house becomes filled with gruesome expectation. * * * TILL, good as it is the film is only partly successful. There are some chills it cannot make you experience in your theatre seat which you might enjoy if you read the story by your own hearth. You must, for instance, take the sensation of grisly cold and the ghostly scent of mimosa for granted. And the reaction of the audience really is a nuisance to the genuine ghost-story fan. Many of them giggle and snigger at all the tensest moments; when you are trying to listen to the poor ghost’s heartbroken sobbing in the night they become positively hilarious. They behave like this partly because they really are excited and to laugh is a natural nervous reaction, but partly also, I think, because they have seen so many bogus spook comedies that they have come to regard anything strange as funny. On the purely material side I commend to your nofice the performance of Gail Russell, a newcomer who portrays the girl for whose possession the good and the bad ghosts contend. One of the characters describes her as being "the (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Sleeping Beauty type." I cannot better that description of her charm, but you, need to see the film to understand what it means. To the special notice of house-hunters I commend the house in which the hauntings occur, sold to the new occupants for £1,200. At that price, most Wellingtonians would think it well worth taking-spooks and all.