Something of the romance of the great days of Hollywood can be conjured up by the name Gene Tierney, an ethereally beautiful actress who starred in the classic film noir Laura (1944) and a string of 1940s melodramas that tended to be categorised as “women’s pictures”. Among the latter was The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947), in which she played a young widow who falls in love with the ghost of a sea captain, in the unlikely form of Rex Harrison.
This book’s subtitle suggests that it might be a reference work, but it is rather a series of critical essays on a selection of films with a ghostly theme and their literary antecedents. In the opening section Lee Kovacs discusses Wuthering Heights and the famous film starring Laurence Olivier under the heading “The Gothic Ghost”. In the second section, “The Romantic Ghost”, she discusses The Ghost and Mrs Muir and the interesting‐sounding novel on which it was based, and three other works of fiction and their film adaptations: Portrait of Jennie, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and The Uninvited. The third section deals with two plays, Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and films made out of them by Fritz Lang and Sam Wood respectively. In the final section Ms Kovacs discusses two films made in the early 1990s which had no literary antecedents: Ghost and Truly, Madly, Deeply. The book has a 69‐item bibliography and includes 23 monochrome stills. It has a touching dedication “To David Tanenbaum, who would have been so pleased.”
Letter from an Unknown Woman is an interesting case of a literary masterpiece (by Stefan Zweig) that was turned into a cinematic masterpiece by the scriptwriter Howard Koch and the great director Max Ophuls (here the “letter” of the title is regarded as a kind of ghost). One of the major themes of The Haunted Screen is that “the ghost film delves into the recesses of human consciousness and uses the world of the beyond as a mirror of the heart”. There is also a story here about the “cataclysmic decline” of Emily Brontë’s extravagant passionate intensity into the “angst and collective futility” of the world at the end of the twentieth century (the contemporary ghost is represented by Patrick Swayze).
