For those hording toilet paper

 

The great Windward House overlooking the cliff to the rocks and shore in The Uninvited (1944)

You will see a lot of us horror fans mention here and there, We love a good ghost story. I think that comes with a strong back story that has been unresolved or some ongoing trouble that hasn't been tempered. In Lewis Allen's The Uninvited (1944), I think there is plenty of that. Two competing ghosts in a house with a history of adultery and murder soon get the attention of Londoner siblings, Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey, happening on the place by accident when their dog started chasing a squirrel on the ground and in the Windward. Hussey takes to it while Milland is uncertain due to job requirements and commitments. But she convinces him to ditch his old music critic job for writing music on his own at the Windward, soon paying the owner of the estate, Donald Crisp, with a lovely 20 year old daughter, Gail Russell.

I've mentioned this plenty of times on the blog, sort of covering the same ground. After mentioning the film after The Uninvited was over, TCM host, Ben Mankiewicz brought up a second Paramount ghost story called The Unseen with Gail Russell -- who I read started using alcohol to "calm her nerves", with the resulting alcoholism taking her life in her young mid 30s tragically -- that I would LOVE to see. Knowing Joel McCrea is in that film makes me want to see it even more.

Miss Holloway (Cornelius Otis Skinner) with Mary's portrait in her office.

I was reassured by some reporting on the film that what I felt with Miss Holloway was correct regarding the lesbian undertones being intentional. It was quite obvious Holloway was in love with her, but the film doesn't even really mask it. The discussion of Holloway and Mary Meredith planning their lives together, how Holloway talks about Mary to her father, Donald Crisp, and how Holloway glowingly praises Mary to Milland and Hussey while denigrating the other woman, Carmel, a model who posed for Mary's husband, later Carmel's lover.

So you have the ghosts emerging at different points, either displaying a cold or warm presence, a certain fragrance, even one of them speaking through Russell while the other takes possession of her, moving her towards the same cliffs that Mary fell to her death neary twenty years prior. Milland wants to protect Russell, as the two are in love: he's a bit older than her, but the film doesn't frown upon that. Meanwhile, Hussey seems to be getting romantically close to the local doctor played by Alan Napier.

I have seen my share of seances lately. It does seem a lot of good ghost stories have one. And this film, in a dark room, lit by a fireplace burning in the background, is quite moodily effective. And there is a ghost, too, as the film's producers felt the need to actually have Mary pop up for Milland to eventually scold and disregard as no longer wanted or feared now that laughter would replace terror.

Russell was just a delicate and lovely young woman. Her life cut so short is just a terrible shame. I have noticed that it seems like alcoholism claimed a lot of great talent in the golden age of Hollywood.