“The Ghost and Mrs Muir” (1947)

This 1947 gem should be mandatory viewing for Peter Jackson or any other contemporary director struggling to make fantasy work on screen.  A romantic drama with a proto-feminist theme, its tale of the attraction between a strong willed widow and a misogynistic sailor is made all the more compelling by the fact that the latter is dead.  Although Rex Harrison’s trade mark role in My Fair Lady was some years off his salty Captain Daniel Gregg is every bit as arrogant and condescending as Henry Higgins and George Sanders is also cast to type as an oily cad.  It is really Gene Tierney’s movie though, the actress enjoying a rare role in which her beauty and talent could be fully exploited.

The unfussy way in which director Joseph L Mankiewicz handles the supernatural elements ensures they never interfere with a love story that is as powerful as any adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”.  The rigorous internal logic that governs Gregg’s afterlife experience could well have been put to good use in “The Lovely Bones”.  Fancy digital effects and New Age mysticism are no substitutes for dramatic clarity, a point that the low-tech “Mrs Muir” proves in every frame.