Contains Spoilers
The Ghost (1963)
is not a movie to be watched in the background. This Italian film is
full of twists and turns that require the viewer's full attention, and
sometimes more. There are parts of this film I'm still not sure I
understood, and in the end everything sort of starting jumbling together
to create a messy glob of plot points.
That
being said, this movie falls into one of my favorite hyperspecific
movie genres: mid-century B-Movie that is just really weird and fucked
up.
I watched The Ghost free on Tubi.
The title screen and credits were in English, and the actors appeared
to also be speaking English, although it may have been Italian, such is
the nature of the movie poster and the possibly-dubbed dialogue. The
subtitles were in Spanish, and it all bounced back to Tubi-generated
English subtitles that were only partially correct, and frequently
messed with pronouns and grammar.
We
set the scene on Scotland, 1910, a location that is English-speaking.
There is a heavy thunderstorm, and the picture is full of shadows that
obscure faces, making characters and surroundings hard to recognize. The
opening scene is possibly a seance, or what may be an exorcism of an
older woman who is babbling incoherently and moving strangely. We never
learn this woman's name. She is revealed as alive halfway through the
movie, living in some other part of the house. That's the last time we
see her.
John
is an older man who is under the care of his in-home doctor Charles.
They already have a strange relationship, as John is, or was, also a
doctor. Charles seems to be performing some kind of medical experiment
on him wherein he poisons him, waits for it to take effect, then quickly
gives him the antidote. The nature of the poison is unknown, but
Charles swears that this method is slowly enabling John to recover.
Enter
Margaret, Charles' wife. She's dressed elaborately in period clothes,
still sporting the iconic 1960s blue eyeshadow and perfect beehive. She
denies it, but John is quick to figure out that she is having an affair
with Charles, meeting him secretly in the greenhouse of this beautiful
gothic mansion. It's implied that Margaret doesn't really love John. She
didn't have a penny when she married, and of course came into all this
wealth afterwards.
In
the greenhouse, we learn that Charles and Margaret are plotting to kill
John. Margaret wants Charles to hurry up the process, and when he is
hesitant, she threatens to take matters into her own hands. This brings
us into my favorite scene of the movie.
A
beautiful lullaby plays from John's music box as he's in his wheelchair
by the window, alone with Margaret. She is getting the blade ready to
shave his face with--the audience knows she will kill him, but John
doesn't. He simply reminisces on the days when they were in love,
Margaret holding a blade to his throat. This music echoes throughout the
movie, and I genuinely cannot convey how much I feel in love with this
waltz. It makes the movie, truly.
The
next day, the priest visits John. Evidently, John has been doing some
seances that the priest doesn't approve of. I really appreciate the
attention to detail here, although I do feel like they could have made a
bigger mention of his hobby as a sort of foreshadowing of his
intentions. John tells the priest that he knows the plot Margaret and
Charles are taking out on him, but the priest does not believe him. Sure
enough, Charles poisons him as is routine, and refuses him the
antidote, killing him.
Margaret
and Charles have carried out their agenda, and finally are lovers.
Then, the haunting begins. The dark lighting and well placed shadows
return, and the service bell John used to call the maid rings, but no
one is there--John is dead. This is upsetting to Margaret, much more so
than it is to Charles. Outside, a dog barks relentlessly, and Margaret
snaps, handing Charles a pistol and ordering him to make it stop.
Charles hesitates, then shoots the dog. Although I never, ever watch a
movie where a dog dies, I didn't turn the movie off. Luckily, although
the dog does make some pitiful sounds, it is never in sight, alive or
dead. This does its job in marking the descent into madness.
Later,
in the daylight, the priest visits the mansion for the reading of the
will. Just before he died, John had called on him to make changes to the
will. These changes dictate that Margaret and Charles must both
continue to live in the house after his death. However, two thirds of
the fortune expected to be left to Margaret was donated to the orphans,
leaving her with one third of what she married into. And boy, does that
upset her.
In
order to secure and divide the fortune legally, Charles and Margaret
must locate the key to John's safe. When they fail to find it in front
of the crowd, they plan with each other to find it that night, secretly,
and take off with the money. Only, they don't find it. Katherine, the
quiet servant that only makes one or two appearances in the first parts
of the movie, mentions to Margaret that the key may be in the pocked of
John's suit jacket--the one they buried him in.
Cue the music box playing on its own--Margaret smashes it in rage.
Here
is where we really begin. Together, Margaret and Charles enter the
crypt where John is buried. They pry open his casket, revealing a
decaying corpse, and Charles reaches in and locates the key in his suit
pocket. At this point I'm only wondering, why couldn't they have picked
the lock, if they were going to make a run for it anyway? They return to
the main house and try the key. The safe is empty.
John
then appears to Margaret alone in her bedroom, peeking through her bed
curtains. It's the same vision of his decaying corpse she saw in his
coffin. What's interesting about this is that is isn't a jump scare. The
whole thing happens slowly, and the corpse lingers for an uncomfortably
long time. Naturally, Margaret shoots at it.
The
next time John's corpse appears it is only to Charles, who finds him
hanging ceiling. The irrelevance of this graphic image is striking. He
never hanged, nor did he drip blood from a mysterious source onto the
floor as he hanged. The face he's making is cartoonish--it's the very
thing you imagine a hanging looking like when you're five years old.
After
these encounters, the framing of the movie is suddenly much lighter.
There are fewer shadows, it's more often daylight, and there's a
beautiful view of the beach. This is reflective of Charles and
Margaret's relationship at the time--although they are haunted, they are
in it together and still in love. The priest bursts this bubble
quickly. He becomes suspicious of Charles living there during Margaret's
time of supposed grief when Margaret misses her own husband's funeral.
She
resolves to visit his grave by herself in full mourning attire and
lovely clashing red roses. Kneeling in front of his grave--where he is
not buried, because he is in a crypt--she hears the slow melody of the
music box. It begins to follow her, and only she can hear it.
The
dark lighting returns, as does the thunderstorm mirroring that of the
first scene, signaling that the climax is approaching. Charles and
Margaret are in the mansion when the classic haunting begins. Curtains
whisp, the chandelier swings, and objects smash for no reason. Margaret
is visibly much more affected than Charles. She quickly becomes
suspicious that he stole the money and planned to run off alone, without
her.
She
finds something of John's that shows her the money may really be
located under his grave. Alone and suspicious, she goes back into the
crypt. I love the repeat of this scene, in a completely different
context. Still in the search for the money, but no longer trusting
Charles and having to act on her own. She cuts her hand over something
unidentifiable placed on his casket--it was too dark to tell what it
was. And still, there was no money.
Dejected,
she goes back into the mansion and finds that Charles, embarrassed by
the priest, is packing his bags to leave. Margaret tips over a bag--it
is completely filled with bills. Charles swears he doesn't know where
they came from, that he loves her, he did not steal the money, and she
doesn't believe him. She stabs him several, several, several times and
burns the body. Katherine, the servant, watches the entire thing.
Here's where it really gets going.
With
the way things went, Margaret goes upstairs to her husband's bedroom
and drinks the remainder of his poison, waiting for it to kick in and
kill her. John then comes out of his secret room behind the bookshelf, alive,
and tells her that in fact, she didn't drink poison. He switched the
bottles around, and she actually drank a liquid that will paralyze her
from the waist down. And by the way, he faked his death.
John
goes into a villainous monologue about what he plotted for Margaret. It
was the maid, Katherine, who ran off with the money after all, not
Charles. She killed him for no reason. When the maid enters the room and
finds them, John thanks her for everything she did to try and prevent
his murder, then promptly shoots her dead. He explains too Margaret that
he had already called the police, and planned to frame Margaret for
Katherine's murder.
Victorious,
smug, he takes a swig out of a bottle of gin. Margaret begins laughing
hysterically--John had previously switched out all the liquids, and the
"gin" he thought he drank was actually poison. He begged Margaret for
the antidote, and she almost gives it to him, but drops it, spilling
into the carpet.
The
police arrive, and in his final moments John slips back into his secret
room to die, possibly for real. They find Margaret sitting in John's
wheelchair over the maid's body and carry her out the door. Margaret
laughs the whole way down.
