" My soul is too weak on it weighs like an unfinished dream, waiting for death ." John Keats.
Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) is a young widow who moves with her daughter Anna (Natalie Wood) and her maid Martha (Edna Best) in a haunted house, located by the sea, which lies the spirit of Captain Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison).
Delightful and touching romantic fantasy in which comedy and drama are combined with skill, deepening issues like the need of love, loneliness, the passage of time or the ephemeral nature of life.
The excellent results that this film offers is a result of the perfect combination of all and each of its components: from script to direction, to performers, music and photography.
is commendable subtlety with which the film takes us from what at first appears to be a light comedy based on the comparison of characters, into a sad and melancholy love drama of profound existential connotations.
Mankiewicz again after having Gene Tierney Dragonwyck Castle (Dragonwyck , 1946) to play the stubborn and determined, but also fragile and sensitive, Lucy Muir. Her exotic face, perhaps the most beautiful that ever appeared on a movie screen, get grumpy and foul-mouthed raise phantom composed by the always great Rex Harrison. Among them began a platonic relationship which completion is impossible for obvious issues, which will allow it to interfere in the brazen character that gives life a cynical George Sanders.
The continuous states of sleep and awakening of the protagonist, give the story a distinctly dreamlike. Perhaps the spirit of Captain Gregg and there is only a dream, or the product of a mind in need of companionship and affection, " I'm here because you think I'm" , Daniel says to Lucy, as he calls it, in a given moment in the film.
undoubtedly contribute to enlarge the work the translucent picture of Charles Lang and the delicate, beautiful and evocative score by the great Bernard Herrmann.
are two moments that stand above the rest throughout the film: the final emotion that will cause the viewer to see startled by the fall of a tear, and that could well serve as inspiration for the closing of the extraordinary also The Empress Yang Kwei-fei ( Yôkihi , 1955) by Kenji Mizoguchi, and the sequence in which the ghost, taking the rest of his beloved, leave of her singing a hauntingly bitter speech:
"How would you like the North Cape, and on the Fjords midnight sun, and surf along the reef in Barbados, where the blue water turns green, and from the Falklands where the southern gale rips the whole sea and white again ... What we have lost, Lucia, what we have lost both ".
Rating: very good .
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