NB: Welcome to Flashback Friday! We’re re-running this awesome guest squee of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir as a palate cleanser for those who aren’t fans psychological thriller movies like The Girl on the Train. It’s also a pretty fitting movie to watch in October. This post was originally published August 17, 2015. 

SB Sarah: Kay Layton Sisk emailed me about her love of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and since I didn’t know much about it at all, I asked if she’d write about the movie and the book for us here. So if you haven’t enjoyed this classic yet, there’s major swoonage ahead. 

I fell in love with the 1947 movie The Ghost and Mrs. Muir in all its black and white, Saturday-afternoon-on-the-independent-channel glory, the first time I watched it. Rex Harrison as the deceased ship captain Daniel Gregg, Gene Tierney as the lonely widow Lucy Muir, a Love That Could Never Be, what was there not to sigh over?

But, as Sarah pointed out to me, not everyone (really?) is familiar with The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. How can it be that not everyone has sat glued to the TV on Saturday afternoons enchanted with old movies? (This is not to dismiss the TV show of the same name from 1968-70, but it’s not part of this discussion.)

But if there are gaps in the Bitchery’s movie knowledge, I must be about closing one of them.

The movie: England, early 20th century and Lucy Muir has spent her adult life under someone else’s thumb. First, that of her husband Edwin, a so-so architect, then, once he dies, her sister-in-law Eva (boo! hiss!) and her mother-in-law (not as bad as Eva, but still—boo! hiss!)

One year after “dear Edwin’s” death, Lucy declares her independence and shocks the in-laws by taking her daughter Anna and moving out. She also takes the cook Martha, who had come with her to their household. One almost gets the feeling that they will miss Martha more than Lucy and Anna, although they beg her to stay. She doesn’t go far, a fact she rues, but far enough. She intends to live on the earnings from Edwin’s gold shares.

She takes a house by the sea, Gull Cottage, a residence, she quickly finds out, that is haunted. Where this fact has frightened other renters, Lucy is fascinated.

And what’s not to fascinate? The “cottage,” actually quite a house, was built by Captain Daniel Gregg. Local lore has it that he haunts it because he committed suicide. Once acquainted, the Captain quickly dispels Lucy of this myth. His death had been an accident. He had meant to leave the house in his will for the use of retired seamen such as himself, but due to the quick and unexpected circumstances of his demise, a cousin in South America inherited instead.

Money is always an issue and Lucy dwells on the rim of poverty once her in-laws delightfully inform her that her gold shares are no longer paying a dividend. But she refuses to move back in with them and they exit the plot.

Throughout, we watch a gentle affection bordering on love grow between Lucy (or Lucia as the Captain insists upon) and Daniel. Her loneliness abates and we watch him care for her, tucking blankets around her while she sleeps, and opening the window so fresh air will ensure that she doesn’t die due to fumes from the gas heater as he did.

 

When finances become desperate, the Captain suggests she write his memoirs, Blood and Swash. Keeping his name out of it (“The Story As Told To…”), she takes the book to a sea-friendly publisher and it becomes a scandalous bestseller. The income allows her to buy the house and will it to retired seamen. All should be well at this point, but…

Lucy’s money may be secure but her heart is in danger. Through her publisher, she meets Miles Fairley, portrayed by George Sanders, an author of children’s books. She falls rapidly under his overly solicitous spell. The Captain does not approve of him, but he loves her too much to stay around and confuse her. He won’t stand in her way of being happy, of having a real life. He quite dramatically (and literally) fades away while he watches her sleep, disappearing from his Lucia’s life, whispering to her that he was but a dream.

Alas, Miles is a cad, a very married-with-children cad. Once Lucy finds out the Awful Truth, she is lonelier than she has ever been and without the benefit of knowing why.

Years pass as the ocean beats on the shore. Anna grows up. Lucy and Martha grow old. At Lucy’s death, Daniel reappears and she, as a young, beautiful woman, rises to meet him. They walk hand and hand away from Gull Cottage.

Be still my heart. Love has conquered all. Sigh.

Recently, I decided to read the 1945 book. Luckily, Vintage Books has done us the favor of reissuing it as part of its Vintage Movie Classics series. Even better, Turner Classic Movies featured Gene Tierney movies recently on a Saturday (and GMM as part of its Essentials viewing) so I was able to renew my acquaintance just as I finished the book.

First things first. R. A. Dick was a pseudonym for Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie (1898-1979), an Irish author, who must have thought, as have women writers before and since, that the best route to publishing was through a pair of initials hinting at masculinity. A recent article on Jezebel highlights that this hasn’t changed.

I liked Josephine’s voice. Really. She’d describe things for a paragraph, give you the sense of it, then on with the story.

The clouds were indeed rolling away, leaving a pale golden sky in the west. The sun’s rays slanting down made a shimmering curtain of the drops still dripping from the sodden thatched eaves of the cottage. On the beach below the sea was coming in with crested green waves, curving over like powerful steel springs before they shattered themselves in a flurry of white, swirling froth, that sucked and dragged at the grey pebbles, rattling the loose stones back into the hidden engine of the seas

Of course, to translate a book to the screen, things have to be rearranged. In the book, Lucy has a son and a daughter. For the movie, exit Cyril, the prig of a son, leaving only a young Natalie Wood as Anna. Eva, her sister-in-law, never really goes away in the book, continuing to pop up and annoy Lucy at all the wrong moments. Also, in the book, Martha goes home after they move in, leaving Lucy to her own devices and the Captain’s dubious help and advice, and doesn’t show back up until the end when the children are grown and each—for their own reasons — wants her to live with them.

The movie moves the selfish cad Miles Fairley (Miles Blane in the book) from a fling at home before Blood and Swash is written to a fling after it’s finished. Here, I like the movie version better. Lucy is still devastated, but it made more sense that he’d meet her through the publisher rather than find her along the cliffs. That said, I found her heartbreak in the book more wrenching than in the movie.

The book concentrates more on the relationship between Daniel and Lucy and less on the writing of his book, which doesn’t even make an appearance until near the end. Daniel never really leaves Lucy. As she ages, they bicker like an old married couple. As to the Captain’s advice, here’s a prime piece of it as he is “consoling” her on the loss of Miles.

“…Like most women you are riddled with the missionary instinct, that always seeks to change a man’s nature and make it a little higher than the angels; whereas a man knows he can’t remake any woman, and if his wife doesn’t suit him, he accepts her as she is or goes out and finds another—”

But the biggest change from book to movie is that Lucy only hears Captain Gregg in the book. She never sees him except for his portrait which dominates any room she moves it to. Of course, if they’d kept him voice-only, poor Rex would have been out a role and, in his Captain’s uniform, he certainly adds a bit of swash to the screen. And vibrancy to Lucy’s (and the female audience’s) blood.

I’m glad I read the book. It in no way diminished my love for the movie, which is now recorded on my DVR along with the 1944 Gene Tierney movie Laura. (Cue a moment-in-time apartment and clothes.) Laura is adapted from a book written by a woman under her own name, Vera Caspary. And, I’m happy to say, available for my Kindle.

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This Guest Squee comes from Kay Sisk, an author and blogger. Her latest book is One Year Past Perfect, and she has a six book series about the love lives and redemption of a rock band. She also put the first book of my rock band series, T’s Trial, for free on Kindle.