THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 431, 26 September 1947, Page 33

THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR

(20th Century-Fox)

H ERE is another woeful case of a director who did. not know how to make a good end. For a fair part of its length, this is an agreeable,

light-weight fantasy about a _ pretty English widow (Gene Tierney) at the turn of the century, who rents a haunted seaside cottage and falls in love with the ghost of its former owner, a salty sea-captain (Rex Harrison). This handsomely-bewhiskered seafarer had gone to sleep one afternoon in his bedroom and accidentally kicked on the gas-jet; his peevish spirit thereafter guards the place from intruders until the comely widow turns up and shows such courageous determination not to be scared that he lets her stay. Later he even collaborates with her in a scheme to relieve her of money troubles, dictat_ing to, her his briny memoirs, which she types down and sells to a delighted but rather bewildered publisher who finds it hard to associate the book’s pungent style with its demure sponsor. The volume, however, is a best-seller; sufficiently so, in fact, to keep the widow for the rest of her days in comfort, together with her maid (Edna Best), her daughter, and her turn-of-the-century cottage. Even for a turn-of-the-century book by a genuine ghost-writer, this seems pretty good voing.

Much less easy to resolve is the widow’s romantic dilemma, when she finds herself falling in love with the ghost. There are obvious difficulties in such a situation; but the producer of the film could, I feel sure, have thought up some acceptable solution, however implausible. He could, for example, have supplied a satisfactory substitute in the flesh by making George Sanders portray a likeable type instead of a mincing ladykiller. Or he might even as a last resort have hastened the heroine off this mortal coil and into her ghostly lover’s arms by causing her to drown herself or be careless with the gas-jet. As it is, the film all but ruins itself entirely in a prolonged and utterly banal attempt to reach a solution which will satisfy everybody-the ghost, the widow, and the audience. What does happen 1s likely to satisfy nobody-certainly not the more discriminating members of the audience, who will be looking at their watches and wriggling in their seats long before the final foggy fade-out. I,