The A posteriori le cinema series is an opportunity to celebrate the 7e art by revisiting key titles each month that celebrate important anniversaries.
This is the story of Lucy, a widow determined to rebuild her life, by herself and for herself. It is also the story of a deceased sailor who takes a dim view of the arrival of this young woman in his house. This explaining that, it is, finally, the story of a love destined never to be consummated. Released in June 1947, the film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Mrs. Muir’s Adventure), by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, remains eternally young despite his 75 years.
Proof of a certain influence, we find traces of this certified classic in a number of subsequent “ghost films”, from the crazy beetle juice (from Tim Burton, 1988) to the agonizing TheOthers (Othersby Alejandro Amenabar, 2001), passing through the romantic Ghost (my ghost of loveby Jerry Zucker, 1990).
However, when the name of Joseph L. Mankiewicz is mentioned in film circles, the brilliant All About Eve (Eve, 1950) is usually the first of his films to be mentioned. Perhaps because of its sentimental component, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is in comparison a little neglected. That said, as soon as he is appointed, we generally only have good things to say about him.
As part of a retrospective devoted to the filmmaker by the Harvard Film Archive, film historian Haden Guest wrote in this regard: “Mankiewicz’s enchanting first masterpiece tells the story of a young widow who defies boldly social conventions by abandoning turn-of-the-century London to live in a secluded coastal cottage haunted by a dashing, embittered ghost. Rich evocation of mourning and melancholy, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir echoes Virginia Woolf in her way of embracing death as a tender life-giving force, in her fascination with the ocean, and in her focus on a woman struggling to find her voice. »
Guest further points to an amused satire of “rigid patriarchy.”
At the Cinémathèque française, we go even further in the praise: “Let’s be subjective, Mrs. Muir is Mankiewicz’s finest film. […] A story of ghosts, of fantasy, of mad romanticism and poignant melancholy, of profound modernity, Mrs. Muir also stands out for its assertive feminism. »
In a reading that is both related and divergent, the critic and film historian Joël Magny rightly salutes “a strangeness that has gradually become familiar”, but refers to Flaubert rather than Woolf. In an essay written for the National Center for Cinema and the Moving Image (CNC), he argues: ” [Lucy] is a prisoner of her time as well as of her own conception, romantic, even romantic, of the accomplishment of a woman’s life, the victim of a certain “bovarysm”. She gradually understands that she cannot realize her dreams – but are they really hers? — only through Daniel and in death. But the choice of a cottage so isolated from the world, this bereaved black silhouette, did they not announce this destiny to which she aspires without despair, seeming to exhaust her strength walking the paths of Whitecliff to reach the country of her dreams and dead…”
Familiarity with perfection
This second vision, however fascinating, is however contradicted by several scenes of the film, which remains very faithful to the spirit of the novel by RA Dick, alias Josephine Leslie.
In fact, the film preserves the theme of emancipation developed throughout the novel, where the author writes in particular: “In reality, she had never had time to realize that she did not live at all as she would have wished, and it was only since her sisters-in-law had allowed her to abandon the innumerable social and worldly duties that they had previously imposed on her that she had gradually discovered that he was of existence. other conceptions which would have suited him much better. »
This awareness is in this case expertly shown in the opening sequence of the film, when Lucy announces to her weeping mother-in-law and her outraged sister-in-law that after a year of widowhood, she is leaving them for Well. Moreover, on the side of the Cinémathèque française, we praise “a realization that borders on perfection”.
However, this was only Mankiewicz’s fourth staging. Arrived in Hollywood in 1929, at barely 20 years old, he began as a screenwriter thanks to the contacts of his brother Herman J. Mankiewicz (subject of the film mankon the genesis of Citizen Kane). Quickly carving out an enviable reputation, he was able to access the director’s chair.
Nowadays, his visual finds in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir continue to attract. In his appreciation of the film, the New Yorker speaks of a “subtly expressive flair”, noting: “The graceful movement of the actors from one side of the camera to the other and the resulting surprising transitions have a musical elegance. Portraying the supernatural with rationalist clarity, probing the paradoxes of loneliness and desire, experience and invention, Mankiewicz invests this richly sentimental and tenderly nuanced tale with deep, unresolved philosophical mystery. »
Wonderful Gene Tierney
The strangeness, the romance, the fantasy, the amorous languor, all this, the composer Bernard Herrmann knew how to translate into music. Despite iconic scores for Hitchcock (Vertigo, psychology), that of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was his favorite.
Another reason why the enchantment aroused by the film continues lies in the quality of its cast: Rex Harrison, George Sanders, Edna Best, a very young Natalie Wood, and above all, above all, Gene Tierney, whom Mankiewicz knew from his first directing, gothic drama Dragonwyck (The dragon’s castle1946).
So a huge starTierney had triumphed in the comic success of Ernst Lubitsch Heaven Can Wait (Heaven can wait1943) and film noir classics Laura (1944) and Leave Her to Heaven (Mortal sin, 1945). In The Ghost and Mrs. Muirhis play full of vivacity combines determination, warmth and – the term is often used to be central to the film – melancholy.
On the count, Mankiewicz especially enjoyed collaborating with actresses, willingly working with the same ones more than once. As Pascal Mérigeau recalls in his biography of the director (Denoël, 1993): “A filmmaker of women, no one, except Cukor, was as much as him. »
Similar story with Olivier Père, who, before becoming director of Arte Cinéma France, wrote in Les Inrockuptibles about the filmmaker and his film: “Mankiewicz, painter of women, portrays a young, independent and modern widow. »
Frankly, Father concludes: “The history of Hollywood cinema is strewn with daydreams and love stories tinged with fantasy. […] But The Ghost and Mrs. Muir remains in this dreamlike and precious domain a must unsurpassable. »
After having revisited this unique work many times, we can only approve.
The film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is available as VOD on most platforms.