So I watched this recently. Interesting “rom-com.” I mean, the romantic chemistry is everywhere in this movie. With Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison, I guess that’s not surprising. So the tension drives a lot of the situations.
I have a weird question, and even though it’s a nearly 70-year old movie, I’m going to spoiler it, because I bet many people have never seen it but think someday that they might. I recommend it, anyhow. And Sally Fields likes it, and Turner Classic Movies categorizes it as “essential.”
[Spoiler]So she’s a young widow when she rents this haunted house. Her husband never contacts her from the other side, but that’s pretty well covered - Captain Gregg’s stuck on earth because of the circumstances of his death. So he’d haunt her, while her husband wouldn’t.
But when she *dies *at the end, Rex Harrison is there to escort her off, and there’s no problem with that on her side. They seem headed for eternity together (do they walk off on the beach or something? I forget.
She doesn’t even give a damn about seeing her actual husband?[/Spoiler]
It’s possible the deceased husband was not a good guy? Or was boring? Or a gambler/drunkard/carouser - he did leave her in debt and living with his stuffy, bossy relatives.
Just wanted to say one of my favorite scenes was when she was taking dictation from the captain, writing his biography. She said “I am not writing that” and he mocked her for being prudish, saying he was just being true to reality. So, with a frown of disapproval, she used one finger to bang on the typewriter keys, four times for four letters.
When she tells the captain how she came to marry her husband, she describes a scene where she was kissed in the orchard… and then her brief, married life didn’t live up to that moment of romance. When she starts on the relationship with the smarmy author of children’s books, the captain calls it “being kissed in the orchard” all over again, presuming it’ll go the same way.
Yes. The 1945 book is a short, entertaining read. In the beginning, Josephine Leslie AKA R.A. Dick efficiently set up late husband Edwin and in-laws as drips of the first water. Virginal 17-year-old novel-reading Lucy had had romantic fantasies of being swept away by a noble hero:
After Edwin suddenly died, Lucy just wanted to sell her house “in order to meet the very real debts which poured in on every side” and to get away, anywhere, with her 2 young children, Cyril and Anna. And so the adventure begins.
Well, as they say in the Order of the Stick comics, the deal was “Til death do we part”. After that, you’re apparently free to get frisky with whatever ethereal spirits suits your fancy.
In Job: A Comedy of Justice, Heinlein sets up a similar dynamic with a Heavenly meeting of the main character and his shrewish widow. She looks at him with great disdain, and asserts that she only signed up “Until Death Do Us Part”, and that, now that she was dead, she was free to do as she liked.
(Which turned out to be giving St. Peter an earful until he had his assistant, a nun who formerly taught judo to the Houston Police Department, chuck her out on her ear.)
The same criticism comes up about Titanic pretty often - It’s been 80+ years since the Titanic sank. Rose unquestionably got married as she has childrend and grand-children and a full, active life of many adventures. Yet at the end, she dies and her afterlife is being back aboard the Titanic (a place she actively disliked being even before it sank), and instead of her late husband she’s greeted by the kid she had a two-day romantic fling with while she was still barely a teenager!
I hadn’t remembered that she was in debt at the beginning of the movie. I guess that meant something different back then, since she rented a house on the sea and had a live-in maid for a lifetime.
I agree with what seems to be the consensus; my impression was that her marriage was not something she had particularly fond memories of.
It isn’t my usual sort of movie. I watched it because I couldn’t muster the concentration or effort to find the remote, due to a fever on the edges of delirium. For some reason, it stuck, and upon watching it again after I got well, I found that I liked it. (And, more relevantly, that I had actually understood it properly the first time, despite irrelevant commentary from the talking cactus on top of the TV.)
I got to use that bit before Rob did, but rather after Heinlein–I was playing a character who got resurrected in front of his nagging wife. “We said, ‘Til death do us part.’ I died, we parted!” (Delivered in a blend of Londo Mollari and Miracle Max voices, by the way.)
At least Heinlein actually addressed the issue (of what had happened to the first spouse/longer-term-relationship). Interesting that neither The Ghost and Mrs. Muir or the Cameron Titanic so much as acknowledge the fact that the other partner must be around, somewhere–given the premise that dead people are available to associate with.
A similar lapse occurs in the 2013 supernatural thriller Mama. It’s based on the not-uncommon-in-fiction premise that those who die violently or unhappily may hang around and harass the living. Early on, it’s established that the father of the two little girls at the center of the plot has murdered their mother. But then the story involves only the Mama of another long-dead child, who “raises” the girls after killing the murderous father. The question: what happened to the murdered mother? She died by violence and unhappily, so why isn’t *she *around?
Yes, well done thanks to our forebears. The “drip of the first water” comment I had previously heard in the 1946 movie Margie. I can believe that the line has been around for hundreds of years and, with F. Hugh Herbert and Ruth McKenney among Margie’s writers, made it into that also fun movie. For the record: Margie’s first boyfriend was Alan Young, now 95, and whose visiting ghost could now be Mister Ed.
At the end of ‘Lost’, Sayid met up with that awful young woman - Shannon? - he had a fling with on the island and they went off into the void hand-in-hand as if they were reunited long-lost lovers! What about his REAL long-lost love, the middle Eastern girl - Nadia? he had always really loved? (I guess if you weren’t on the island, you didn’t count, but still, Shannon?? Really??)