[Movie Clip]
David Hast: Scott, have you seen The Uninvited?
Scott Vander Werf: I have seen The Uninvited, made in 1944, directed by Lewis Allen with Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, Gail Russell and Donald Crisp. Interesting movie in terms of…I love supernatural films and ghost stories and this was something that kind of took me by surprise when I watched it recently.
DH: Yeah, let's make sure people don't confuse it. There have been a number of movies called The Uninvited, a couple of them recently, most of them, based on the title, or kind of horror or something like that. This is 1944 and yeah, it's a ghost story. But what's interesting, you and I both looked into this. Before this movie, apparently there were no serious ghost stories made in Hollywood. Most of them were either light comedies where you aren't actually asked to believe in ghosts or the so-called ghosts are something that con artists or fake spiritualists or mediums are doing to fool vulnerable people.
SVW: Yeah, to con them out of their money.
DH: Right, but in this movie, it's real. And nowadays, there's been a ton of ghost movies since and lots of horror movies, the whole development of the genre. A lot of people won't find this movie to be all that scary, but it's spooky and the mood definitely still works even now. And it really was the movie that set the tone for all movies that followed in Hollywood that were serious ghost stories.
SVW: And there are moments in the film where there is some levity. Or a lightheartedness and it's because of the way the characters respond to the ghost story, even though they believe it's real, the way that they're responding is such that, hey, we'll deal with this.
DH: Yeah, and they even, don't they then usually accompany that with funny music or something? So they'll get you going to think, oh, it's funny again. And that's what most ghost stories have been. And then all of a sudden it'll almost turn on a dime and become very creepy again. So the story of the uninvited is there's this brother and sister, Rick and Pamela Fitzgerald, played by Ray Milan and Ruth Hussey, and they come across this beautiful unoccupied home on the sea cliffs of Cornwall in England, right on the ocean, and they find out the house is for sale, and on a whim, they decide to buy it. And they meet the old gentleman, Commander Beach, who owns it, and he sells it to them for a really good price, although right away, something comes up that there's sort of rumors that it might be haunted, but he just laughs that off and they don't believe it, of course. But what's interesting is the commander has his granddaughter named Stella Meredith, and she's only 20 years old, and she's really upset that her grandfather sold the house. She only lived there as a baby, but she's really attached to it because it's where her parents lived and she was born and it's where her mother died. And the commander forbids Stella to go there. So now we're already suspecting what he said about ghosts might not be quite right. And then Rick and Pamela pretty quickly experience the classic ghost stuff. Unexplained rooms that suddenly get chilly, the strong scent of mimosa flowers that appears for no apparent reason, and they hear a woman's distinct woman's cries and moans in the night. And it appears that the house is haunted after all. As it develops, Rick and Stella...So remember, this is a brother and sister who own the house, Rick and Pamela. Rick and Stella become involved romantically, and he lets Stella come to the house against her grandfather's wishes. And she seems calm at first and is kind of glad to be back there. But then she suddenly rushes out and almost falls off the cliff into the sea, which it turns out is exactly how her mother died, falling off that same cliff, same spot. And Rick saves her at the last minute. And then they learn this tragic story. Stella's mother, Mary, died falling from this cliff. And Stella's father had had an affair with this Spanish artist named Carmel, who was living with them. And eventually they have a seance in the movie, which definitely is not approved by the grandfather. He doesn't even know about it. But Stella's there and the two of them and another character. And she goes into this trance and she begins speaking Spanish. So it now appears that there are two ghosts in the house.
SVW: There are two ghosts and then they show you that one seems to be more benevolent than the other. And one seems to be the one where you go into the studio, which is up on the second floor. The second floor seems to be primarily where the rooms are very cold. The characters feel like a malevolence that's there. But downstairs is where the mimosas smell is, the flowery smell is. But also downstairs seems to be where the distress is heard in terms of the moaning and crying.
DH: Yeah, I hadn't noticed all that upstairs downstairs divisions.
SVW: And both the pets, the cat and the dog refuse to go up the stairs. That's a significant thing right from the beginning. In the first scene, there's a dog that's introduced with the brother and sister. In fact, that's how they become interested in the house is that the dog follows a squirrel through an open window into the house, but the dog won't go up on the second floor.
DH: Yeah, and isn't that a classic thing for ghost movies? The animals kind of know, right? They also show a cat that arches its back and hisses and also won't go up the stairs to the second floor. So the movie, what's great about it is the way that it builds in power and that they give you, they fool you with little moments of humor, but then it goes against that expectation and it gets really dark and moody, even kind of evil feeling. And they use a lot of visual and sound effects for that. One really clever thing that they did was, for some reason, the house has no electricity. Did you notice that?
SVW: Yeah. So they have to use candles and lanterns.
DH: But this is supposed to be taking place in the present day in the 1940s when of course, virtually all houses had electricity. This isn't like super remote or anything, but by not having electricity, lets them…everything looks like it's lit by candles. Of course, in the 1940s, you could not actually light a scene by candles like you can now. It required a clever use of lighting. But still, lets the great cinematographer, Charles Lang, use a lot of darkness and shadow. I think the total effect with the suspense, and you're not quite sure, and the lighting and the mood, is it reminded me a lot of the Val Luton horror films around the same time.
SVW: I can see that. And you see from the very get-go in terms of how Charles Lang shoots his cinematography where you see the ocean and the cliff where the house sits upon. The house itself is very impressive in terms of the architecture. you really, there's always, the setting always enhances the story.
DH: Yeah. And their decision about what to show and what not. Because a lot of times with ghost movies, we kind of think we're not gonna ever see the ghost, right? It can be just done as more like psychological horror. And apparently, at first Paramount Pictures, who made this, they didn't wanna show the ghost, but then the director really did and they did and they did great visual effects.
SVW: And the other thing is that they don't show you, it’s one of those great things in terms of suspense or horror movies where you only get a little bit of a hint of what things are and. by the end of the film, you're gonna see more than what you've seen earlier.
DH: Yeah. It's worth talking about the actors in this. I think we could do a whole show on Ray Milland. He's one of those workmen actors who is in over a hundred movies, many great movies. He won his one Oscar for a movie right after this one, The Lost Weekend, with Billy Wilder, which was one of the very first movies to really seriously look at serious alcoholism. And Ruth Hussey is a wonderful actress, but the actress...that people usually talk about the actor in this movie is Gail Russell, who really is the main focus of the movie because it's her mother and this other character that are haunting the house. She was the one that was saved and almost went over the cliff too as a baby. It all revolves around her. And this is her first real big role. mean, she'd had a couple minor parts before this, but this is Gail Russell, 18 years old, who had just been discovered by a Hollywood producer. She had no acting experience. And she's really interesting because Gail Russell has often been criticized as not being a very good actress. And her acting technique is kind of stiff at times. And another actress, if she'd had the part, almost certainly would have delivered a lot of the lines better. But she has this really strongly convincing screen presence, don't you think?
SVW: She does, and she's very beautiful. She was a beauty queen when she was in high school, and it's because of her looks that she ended up becoming an actress. was, you know, the typical sort of story of being discovered, you know, not necessarily in the drugstore or something, but she was discovered as a result of being the beauty queen.
DH: It was almost discovered that way. It was not someone who came up for, you know, as having been in entertainment or...acting or anything. She was just discovered by this Hollywood producer somehow when she was in high school. She's a tragic story, unfortunately. Gail Russell apparently was never really comfortable with acting. She was an artist. She liked to draw and paint and she was always very uneasy acting. And as early as this movie, the story goes, maybe, she started to drink to relax and it ended up becoming a terrible alcoholism and she died at age 36.
SVW: She died of liver disease at the age of 36 and her last several years of acting it was on again and off again because of her drinking problems were known. She had several accidents where she either drove into buildings or she had car accidents hitting other cars while under the influence. And yeah, was this movie it was actually one of the people that either make up or somebody that was in the behind the scenes suggested to her that she drink some alcohol before doing her scenes to relax. And that was really the beginning of her alcoholism.
DH: Yeah, she was only 18 and you know, but she went on and did a lot of interesting movies. She's kind of an interesting actress. She was in a couple movies with John Wayne. She was in a fascinating film noir called Moonrise. They did a sequel to this movie with Joel McCrae.
SVW: It wasn't really a sequel. It was inspired by this, but it takes place in the US. It has completely different characters, but she is the star of it.
DH: Oh, I didn't realize that. Because it's next year and it's called The Unseen, which sounds like, know, uninvited unseen sounds like a sequel, but she's not playing the same
SVW: She's not playing the same character. And then it takes place in the United States, whereas The Uninvited actually takes place...in England, Cornwall, England, even though it shot in Hollywood. Another actor that's really, that I found, as soon as I saw him, I recognized him, Donald Crisp, who plays the gentleman who sells the house, who's the grandfather. Not only was he a very prolific actor, but he was also a director during the silent era. He played Ulysses S. Grant in The Birth of the Nation in 1915. Once the sound era came in, he...he stopped directing films and was an actor. And John Carradine is usually thought of as being the most prolific actor in Hollywood, but he would always say in interviews, Donald Crisp was in more films than I was. And Donald Crisp was in over 400 films.
DH: Yeah, I was gonna say, that's hundreds of films.
SVW: And there's so many. then he ended up in 1941, he won the Oscar for best supporting actor for How Green Was My Valley, directed by John Ford. And he was an actor up until he was 92 years old. The other thing that's interesting is that he was a big power broker and businessman in Hollywood throughout the era because he had what was called banker sobriety. He was not a party guy and he invested money in real estate, which only obviously only grew in value throughout the decades in Los Angeles. He was a very wealthy man just from his business interests.
DH: He's one of those guys in the early days of Hollywood. You said birth of a nation. So you're talking like he's there in 1912 or 1915 buying land. Yeah. In the LA area.
SVW: And then he was a fascinating guy. He actually went back to the during World War I. He took a sabbatical to go back and join the British military and fight in World War I. He became a U.S. citizen after that, and then he was in the Army National Reserve during World War II. So a fascinating character.
DH: Definitely one of those faces you see in movie after movie in the old movies, huh?
SVW: Yeah, that's that. See, immediately when he was in his first scene, I'm like, I've seen this guy in so many movies, so many movies. Now, another aspect for me as as music director here at WGVU FM playing jazz was that the standard Stella by Starlight composed by Victor Young was introduced in this movie in 1944 and then later, Charlie Parker did the first jazz recording, 1952, was followed by Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Bill Evans Trio, and then vocal versions, Ray Charles, Anita O'Day, Ella Fitzgerald, I mean, so many, it's just, even today, it's one of those American standards that is performed by jazz musicians all the time. So that was fascinating to see that this was the origin for that. It was also in other movies. It was in Forever Female with Ginger Rogers in 1953. it’s interesting to me that this is where Stella by Starlight was created.
DH: That is interesting because if you think all the things we're talking about, this kind of a little bit of an obscure movie with Gail Russell and probably the thing that has lasted the longest and more most people would know about from what you're saying is probably that song.
SVW: Is Stella by Starlight and it's called Stella by Starlight. Because the Ray Milan character plays a composer and Gail Russell the woman he falls in love with is named Stella.
DH: Well, thanks for talking about it Scott
