In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
There’s nothing like chilly weather and shortened daylight hours to put me in mind of ghost stories, and one of my favorites is Lewis Allen’s The Uninvited, which through the magic of the studio system produces the impression that it takes place in Cornwall despite being shot entirely in California and Arizona. It’s one of the most beautiful black and white films ever made, the frights are more slow burn than jump scare, and it feels surprisingly fresh despite being released over 80 years ago. The Uninvited was also the debut film of Gail Russell, includes a breakthrough role for Ray Milland (who would win the Best Actor Oscar two years later for The Lost Weekend), and boasts one of the few movie appearances of Cornelia Otis Skinner, a stage actress and author whose imperious bearing makes an immediate impression.
The Uninvited begins with a poetical voiceover* spoken by Ray Milland, who describes the haunted presences of Cornwall and reflects on how he and his sister came to buy a house there. Cutting to a flashback that will last the rest of the film, we see Rick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Milland and Ruth Hussey) on a walking holiday on the Cornish coast when their dog chases a squirrel into an unoccupied house. Thus begins a comical sequence, one of numerous scattered throughout the film, which act to break up the more ghostly moments in a way that keeps things from getting too somber.
Immediately smitten by the place, which reminds them of their childhood home, Rick and Pamela decide to make an offer and successfully purchase it at a bargain price from the owner, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp), despite the protests of his granddaughter Stella Meredith (a positively smoldering Gail Russell). The idea is that Rick will use the house to compose music, free from the pressures of his journalist job in London, while Pamela will do whatever loyal sisters do while waiting to get married (in the book she’s been taking care of her elderly mother, which explains why she doesn’t seem to have either a career or a love life).
The reason the house came cheaply is soon revealed: it’s haunted by a ghost that keep everyone up at night and seems to be out to harm Stella in particular. The house also has some less mystical baggage: it was the site of two deaths, that of Stella’s mother Mary Meredith and her father’s artist model and mistress Carmel (described in this film as a “Spanish gypsy”). The rest of the backstory is gradually revealed although, as in a good Agatha Christie novel, acquired “knowledge” can be highly fallible.
Attempts to solve the mystery bring Pam and Rick into contact with the formidable Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner), who runs a creepy mental health institution and was clearly in love with Mary Meredith. There are lots of negative remarks by the other characters about improper female behavior in this film (“hated and refused motherhood” is not the worst of it) but it also includes a surprising positive recollection of two ambitious young women who made plans to conquer life, as so many ambitious young men have similarly done. Pam and Rick also get useful information from the local doctor (Alan Napier) and from the local folk courtesy of their stereotypically Irish maid, Lizzie Flynn (Barbara Everest).
The Uninvited is the kind of film that offers something for everyone: a tense ghost story, a mystery to be solved, melodramatic action sequences, a lesbian subplot that requires a bit of interpretation to recognize, goofy comic interludes, and a properly Shakespearean ending that marks this film as a comedy rather than a tragedy. The skill that went into making it is another reason it’s such a reliable pleasure: all the technical elements are well-done, as you would expect from a major studio film of Hollywood’s Golden Era, and the black and white low-light cinematography by Charles Lang Jr. is particularly noteworthy. In fact, it and earned him one of his 18 Oscar nominations (he won once, for the 1932 A Farewell to Arms). | Sarah Boslaugh
*The screenplay is credited jointly to Dodie Smith (who also wrote 101 Dalmatians) and Frank Partos and is based on a novel by Dorothy Macardle, so I don’t know who should get credit for writing the opening monologue.
Spine #: 677
Technical details: 99 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.37:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD
Extras: video analysis “Giving Up the Ghost” by filmmaker Michael Almereyda; two radio adaptations starring Ray Milland, from 1944 (Screen Guild Theater) and 1949 (Screen Director’s Playhouse); the film’s trailer (a rather hard-sell attempt to make it sound like a creature feature); booklet with an essay by Farran Smith Nehme and an interview with Lewis Allen by Tom Weaver.
Fun Fact: The jazz standard “Stella by Starlight” got its start on the soundtrack for this film, as an instrumental used both as the title theme and diegetically within the film. Victor Young composed the music, Ned Washington later added the lyrics, and it’s been a hit as both an instrumental and a vocal.
Parting Thought: You don’t have to be a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist to see the lesbian content in The Uninvited, which raises the question: how did this film ever get past the censors?
