by ·Comments Off on Storm in a Teacup (1937, Ian Dalrymple & Victor Saville)

Honestly, even just a month after watching 78/52, Vivian Leigh did not look familiar here. I have a Vivan Leigh facial recognition problem. We both enjoyed seeing the young, fiery, sexy version of Rex Harrison, who plays an extremely principled reporter who falls for the daughter of the mayor he’s attacking in print. The mayor is the sort of cartoonishly blinkered rich asshole who finally gets in trouble for ordering the death of a poor woman’s dog. Codirector Dalrymple was better known for his writing, for which he got two oscar nominations the following year.

Poor dogless Sara Allgood, in montage-dissolve against a raging storm:

Rex and Viv:

Mayor Cecil Parker gives his big speech… have I mentioned this is set in Scotland?

by ·Comments Off on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947, Joseph Mankiewicz)

My second ghost story this month after Journey to the Shore, which also featured corporeal-looking ghosts with appearances signaled by lighting changes. Widowed Mrs. Muir (Gene Tierney at her cutest, also of ghost film Heaven Can Wait) gets a good deal on a haunted house. She soon runs into financial trouble, but rather than get rid of the housekeeper (Edna Best, the Doris Day of the original Man Who Knew Too Much), she teams up with house-ghost Captain Gregg (Rex Harrison, the My Fair Lady/Unfaithfully Yours lead shouter at his shoutiest) to ghostwrite his uncensored memoirs.

The living Mrs. Muir and dead Mr. Gregg learn to tolerate each other and gradually develop deeper feelings, but Gregg disappears after she starts dating a children’s author she meets at her publisher’s, creepy George Sanders (Ingrid’s husband in Voyage to Italy). When that doesn’t work out because he turns out to be married, she stays home staring at the sea for decades until death, when she’s reunited with her beloved captain (he could’ve come back sooner and kept her company, but it’s still a nice ending).

One of Joe Mank’s earliest movies, two years before A Letter to Three Wives. The story was expanded into a late-1960’s TV series with Laura Dern’s mom from Blue Velvet as the lead, and an Irishman from Caprice as the ghost.