The Uninvited (1944)

“Why do you want to be a 1940s screen-writer, Rachel?”

Well as David Bordell says:

“It was a period when bold story-telling techniques were deployed with an eager, sometimes reckless energy.”

It was a period of increased inventiveness set against a background of complex politics, changing gender relations and censorship. There was also an uneven public emotional terrain of war, poverty, patriotism and psychoanalysis.

But most importantly, for me as an aspiring screenwriter of the 1940s, it was the era of the Women’s movie. It was a time when cinema catered for and centred women – well, some women. Not all women can be centre-stage. It helps to be white, within a particular age-frame, and ‘respectable’. If women are going to watch big screen stories, it had better have a moral in these moralising times. And for those that stray from the norm there is always a haunting…

Martin Scorsese has named The Uninvited (1944) as his favourite ghost film. And it is a film in which women haunt, are haunted or terrorise in their earthly forms.

The Uninvited is an early example of the Hollywood ghost story. To a more contemporary sensibility it may appear tame – no jump-scares, no monsters, no sustained horror, just wisps of smoke, heavy breaths and a trance-like atmosphere with waves crashing as beauty and terror. Perhaps if the originally assigned director, Hitchcock, had not had scheduling clashes, it might have delivered greater suspense. It certainly has echoes of Rebecca (1940). But Lewis Allen delivers a literary, theatrical, grown up movie.

I came to it because I am considering writing a blog about Gail Russell for whom this film was her first big role. It was also the role that introduced her to alcohol which was to shorten her life considerably. And so there is a haunting in the film derived from knowing that her career was so short-lived.

It is set in a haunted house. A site of twisted domesticity, with the residues of family history, nostalgia and the terror of intimacy and domesticity.

The set up - Rick (Ray Milland) and his sister Pamela (Ruth Hussey) fall upon the abandoned Windward House while on holiday in Cornwall. They fall in love with the grandeur, the sweeping staircase and the views of the tumultuous sea that crashes on the rocks below. It would be perfect for Rick to resume his composing career.

Commander Beech is happy to sell it at well below market value, because it is where his daughter Mary Meredith, lost her life by falling from the cliff. His granddaughter, Stella, (Gail Russell) is upset by the sale.

The siblings move in and immediately sense a chill, a malevolence in the building, especially in the artists studio where Rick had placed his piano. The house sobs and moans. Stella comes to visit and believes those sobs to be her mother calling and runs to the cliff edge… Rick saves her just in time.

As part of the siblings’ attempts to find peace they hold a séance and uncover documents, medical records and diaries. Meanwhile Stella’s behaviour means her grandfather places her in a sanitorium in the care of her mother’s best friend, Miss Holloway.

The film succeeds in frightening without gore. All murders are reported, no injury is sustained. It takes the idea of malevolent spirits seriously. The hauntings are real with real consequences.

Without giving away too much plot, I can say that the threat to the family unit is unspoken, and that it comes from external temptation. There is something that haunts family life, as communism haunts the public sphere. The enemy that under the Hayes code cannot be named, so is portrayed as extreme female bonding. This means that the most terrifying character is not one of the dead spirits in the house, but Miss Holloway (played by Corneilia Otis Skinner). She focuses on a portrait of her friend and says:

“Mary was a goddess. Her skin was radiant and that bright, bright hair. How this room brings her back to me. The nights we sat talking in front of that fireplace. Planning our whole lives.”

And then when left alone with the portrait of the blonde, beautiful friend she says:

“So they’re searching into the past. They shall never find out my darling. I promise you.”

And the audience shivers. This may have got past the censors, but we know what we are supposed to fear.

The film moves towards a finale of restored heteronormative relationships. So we can all breathe out in relief.

But what if… what if women were allowed more options, would that possibility really be so frightening.

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