Love and Death: Gene Tierney in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

SteynonLine ^ | February 8, 2025 | Rick McGinnis

[Twotone]

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was a hit when it was released in 1947, the tenth-biggest grossing film of that year, and it's hard not to see why. A romantic but not melodramatic story, it had just enough wry comedy to draw an audience of both men and women, and a veneer of literate quality that lands it square in that middlebrow sweet spot that once did a lot to broaden any film's appeal.

You can even go a step further and speculate that the romance at its centre, between a young widow and a recently deceased ghost, might have resonated with all the women who had lost loved ones during the war that had concluded just two years previous. There were, to be sure, a lot of ghosts wandering around America and the world at the time, in a miasma of shared grief that would take years to dissipate.

Just three years earlier the first modern ghost story picture was released with The Uninvited, the same year that tough cop Dana Andrews had fallen in love with a (presumably) dead woman in Laura. Mrs. Muir was played by the titular Laura, Gene Tierney, so the ground had been prepared for a movie about terror-free supernatural amour fou, set at the turn of the 20th century, which happened to be the era of choice for contemporary nostalgia, evoked in films as different as Meet Me in St. Louis, Life with Father, The Magnificent Ambersons and I Remember Mama.

Which is to say that The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is the sort of film that audiences would have settled into like a warm bath. The film's credits roll over Bernard Herrmann's ominous theme (he considered it his best score), hinting at spectral events to come...

[Chickensoup]

Thanks

I appreciate it.

I follow funerary art. Not an expert just respect how grief expresses itself in everyday life.

[TalBlack]

This is also on a stone in Calvary over the grave of a 15 year old girl who died circa 1885:

SNATCHED IN YOUTH AND BLOOM AWAY
TO THIS DARK GRAVE TO DECAY
SO DEAR FRIENDS AND FAMILY
WHEN YOU COME HERE PRAY FOR ME. ( Not sure I’d put that on my child’s stone).

[TalBlack]

Saw the monument this AM remembered your request “1st Lt. Alfred S. Inzerilli “ Calvery Cemetery Queens NY. A lot of the Calvary monuments are on Find A Grave.

[Chickensoup]

I willlook him up.

My mother spoke about the monuments young girls Italian cemeteries being a broken column.

[TalBlack]

The broken column is a fairly common thing a hundred years ago. I see them all the time. IIRC it signifies an interrupted life. An early death. Jews and Christians.

[Chickensoup]

Haven’t seen them here

[TalBlack]

Here in NY we have scores of monster acre rural cemeteries. They started in the 1840s and have filled up pretty quick. The almost five hundred acre Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn was during the 19th century and has become again a tourist destination. I’m typing this in Second Calvary in Queens surrounded by the graves of three million people. The most either in the world or in America, can’t remember which.

If you ever make it to NYC visit Greenwood in Brooklyn. There’s a trolly that will take you on the tour or you can walk. If you truly have an interest in funerary art and go to Greenwood pack a lunch, you’ll kill the entire day and then some.

[Chickensoup]

Sounds very interesting. Fun even.