Spirits of the seaside

Waves are always crashing against the shore in The Uninvited (1944), lulling in a way that seems more threatening than calming—things happen when you slip into a trance. If you live near the ocean the ocean is ordinary, but ordinary things are eerie here, houses most of all. English thespian Lewis Allen’s film directing debut is a beguiling gem from wartime Hollywood, a ghost story riddled with whimsy but finally very serious about specters, and, like any good spooky movie, very focused on atmosphere. Charles Lang, Jr. won an Oscar for his cinematography, which not only renders those crashing waves as sensual and doom-laden but also manipulates the light beaming off those waves so that it enters people’s homes—that ocean really is everywhere—and plays with shadow in a way that’s mysterious and unnerving, romantic and sexy. “It’s getting almost too dark to see you,” says the film’s leading man to the woman he’s slowly falling for. The penumbra is where lovers meet, and where billowing phantoms materialize. The Uninvited is now available for inviting into your own home, on Blu-ray or DVD, thanks to the Criterion Collection.

Based on a novel by Dorothy Macardle, something about The Uninvited’s set-up strikes me as curious. Patrick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) are wandering along the Cornish coast when they discover Winward House, a vacant hilltop manor with vast rooms and a bleak recent history. Before they learn of that history, which involves “a quiet, ladylike” murder, they spontaneously decide to put all their savings into buying the house. The two get along swimmingly. They’re young enough, charming enough and good-looking enough—though Pamela’s approach to her eyebrows betrays some hidden eccentricity—to give the air of a happy couple. They’re actually brother and sister. I’m not implying anything unseemly, but the odd closeness of these siblings is just one of many weird and compelling ingredients in The Uninvited’s simmering stew.

So Patrick, a music critic and aspiring composer—he actually composes 'Stella by Starlight' during the film—is a free agent, leaving him to wonder about Stella Meredith (Gail Russell), the sleepy eyed beauty whose grandfather sells Winward House to the Fitzgeralds against her will. You see, there’s familial weirdness here too: when the Fitzgeralds first enter Winward Pamela instantly feels attracted to it on account of its resemblance to their childhood home and the memories it stirs of their deceased mother; Stella doesn’t want her grandfather to sell Winward because it is a monument to her mother, who lived in the house and died when Stella was three, along with Stella’s father and her father’s Spanish mistress. Stella thinks her mother still lingers in Winward and, judging from the disembodied weeping that wafts through Winward’s rooms, she may be right.

Criterion’s Uninvited is slim on supplements, but what it’s got is pretty great. Filmmaker Michael Almereyda provides an excellent audiovisual essay that clocks in at just under a half-hour. It includes a smart survey of Milland’s long career, a biographical sketch on Russell, whose tenure in Hollywood was fraught with insecurity and reckless drinking, a chapter entirely devoid of narration, and another featuring an interview with an anthropologist speaking about the history of spiritualism, featuring a shot of Almereyda’s subject that appears to be taken from the point of view of a ghost. 

           

Days when every shrub poses a threat

A man alone in a room, waiting in the gloom, unnervingly still, watching the clock on the wall. On the wall behind the man, the man’s shadow hovers close, doubling him, looming, succubus-like, ready to follow the man when, once the clock strikes six, he rises from that chair and leaves Lembridge Asylum.

What story shall we tell? One of the truly delicious things about the opening moments of Ministry of Fear (1944) is that it’s so saturated with forbidding mood and transfixing ambiguity that it seems it could go anywhere, could become any number of stories. The story that it does become, one of geopolitical intrigue, deadly pursuit, paranoia, betrayal, mystery pastry, and guilt, is dizzyingly dense with plot—and with plots—and, to my eyes and ears, a deeply satisfying, dream-like suspense film. Certain elements are very much of the time, with Nazis aplenty, yet the film feels out of time, of any time—its eeriness is timeless. Oddly enough, you get the impression that this timelessness, this careful drawing upon anxiogenic symbols from the collective unconscious, is precisely what Graham Greene, whose novel provided the film with its source material, didn’t like. And he claimed that Fritz Lang, the film’s director, didn’t like it either. Perhaps because, at that time, it seemed so important to make Ministry of Fear, like Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) and Hangmen Also Die (1943), an explicitly anti-Nazi picture—Lang was a self-exiled German—and the film’s Nazis simply weren’t Nazi enough: no secret chambers adorned with swastika flags or giant portraits of the Führer, no maniacal speeches about world domination. Fair enough, I suppose. But what we have in the place of a rallying cry for the Allies is a wildly evocative, exquisitely designed, utterly entertaining nightmare. The film is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion.

That man in the room is Stephen Neale. One of the first people he encounters is a fortune-teller, who seems to be waiting for him. She wants to talk about the women in his past, something that makes him very uncomfortable—Neale did time in Lembridge after being found guilty of “mercy killing” his ailing wife. Neale’s played by Ray Milland, one of those rare stars who could easily be the hero or the heavy, whose every gesture is perfectly gauged so as to draw us in and alternately earn our sympathies and prompt us to question his reliability. Against the advice of his doctor, Neale opts to head straight to London upon release. A bustling city, and a place upon which bombs could fall at any moment—talk about ominous. Everything in Ministry of Fear is ominous, from the weird din of boisterous laughter that Neale finds in certain crowds to the séance in which the medium speaks directly to him, from the perpetual fog to the sculpted shrubbery to the ladies large-brimmed translucent hats. Lang, as responsible for ushering German expressionism into Hollywood cinema as anyone, accents the unease by keeping the characters most often in the middle distance (that trademark dearth of point-of-view), and by not relying on the musical score in key moments of tension. So many of the film’s scenes are so compellingly strange: a blind man cane-tapping his way through a curtain of steam; two grown men eating cake without plates or cutlery on a train; a carpet of Englishmen sleeping on the floor of a tube station bomb shelter; a tailor (Dan Duryea) dialing a telephone with a giant pair of scissors. Every moment promises something new, some development that might change the course of everything. It’s almost surreal. But haven’t you had days like this?