Contains Spoilers
The Ghost (1963) is not a movie to be watched in the background. This Italian film is full of twists and turns that require the viewer's full attention, and sometimes more. There are parts of this film I'm still not sure I understood, and in the end everything sort of starting jumbling together to create a messy glob of plot points.
That being said, this movie falls into one of my favorite hyperspecific movie genres: mid-century B-Movie that is just really weird and fucked up.
I watched The Ghost free on Tubi. The title screen and credits were in English, and the actors appeared to also be speaking English, although it may have been Italian, such is the nature of the movie poster and the possibly-dubbed dialogue. The subtitles were in Spanish, and it all bounced back to Tubi-generated English subtitles that were only partially correct, and frequently messed with pronouns and grammar.
We set the scene on Scotland, 1910, a location that is English-speaking. There is a heavy thunderstorm, and the picture is full of shadows that obscure faces, making characters and surroundings hard to recognize. The opening scene is possibly a seance, or what may be an exorcism of an older woman who is babbling incoherently and moving strangely. We never learn this woman's name. She is revealed as alive halfway through the movie, living in some other part of the house. That's the last time we see her.
John is an older man who is under the care of his in-home doctor Charles. They already have a strange relationship, as John is, or was, also a doctor. Charles seems to be performing some kind of medical experiment on him wherein he poisons him, waits for it to take effect, then quickly gives him the antidote. The nature of the poison is unknown, but Charles swears that this method is slowly enabling John to recover.
Enter Margaret, Charles' wife. She's dressed elaborately in period clothes, still sporting the iconic 1960s blue eyeshadow and perfect beehive. She denies it, but John is quick to figure out that she is having an affair with Charles, meeting him secretly in the greenhouse of this beautiful gothic mansion. It's implied that Margaret doesn't really love John. She didn't have a penny when she married, and of course came into all this wealth afterwards.
In the greenhouse, we learn that Charles and Margaret are plotting to kill John. Margaret wants Charles to hurry up the process, and when he is hesitant, she threatens to take matters into her own hands. This brings us into my favorite scene of the movie.
A beautiful lullaby plays from John's music box as he's in his wheelchair by the window, alone with Margaret. She is getting the blade ready to shave his face with--the audience knows she will kill him, but John doesn't. He simply reminisces on the days when they were in love, Margaret holding a blade to his throat. This music echoes throughout the movie, and I genuinely cannot convey how much I feel in love with this waltz. It makes the movie, truly.
The next day, the priest visits John. Evidently, John has been doing some seances that the priest doesn't approve of. I really appreciate the attention to detail here, although I do feel like they could have made a bigger mention of his hobby as a sort of foreshadowing of his intentions. John tells the priest that he knows the plot Margaret and Charles are taking out on him, but the priest does not believe him. Sure enough, Charles poisons him as is routine, and refuses him the antidote, killing him.
Margaret and Charles have carried out their agenda, and finally are lovers. Then, the haunting begins. The dark lighting and well placed shadows return, and the service bell John used to call the maid rings, but no one is there--John is dead. This is upsetting to Margaret, much more so than it is to Charles. Outside, a dog barks relentlessly, and Margaret snaps, handing Charles a pistol and ordering him to make it stop. Charles hesitates, then shoots the dog. Although I never, ever watch a movie where a dog dies, I didn't turn the movie off. Luckily, although the dog does make some pitiful sounds, it is never in sight, alive or dead. This does its job in marking the descent into madness.
Later, in the daylight, the priest visits the mansion for the reading of the will. Just before he died, John had called on him to make changes to the will. These changes dictate that Margaret and Charles must both continue to live in the house after his death. However, two thirds of the fortune expected to be left to Margaret was donated to the orphans, leaving her with one third of what she married into. And boy, does that upset her.
In order to secure and divide the fortune legally, Charles and Margaret must locate the key to John's safe. When they fail to find it in front of the crowd, they plan with each other to find it that night, secretly, and take off with the money. Only, they don't find it. Katherine, the quiet servant that only makes one or two appearances in the first parts of the movie, mentions to Margaret that the key may be in the pocked of John's suit jacket--the one they buried him in.
Cue the music box playing on its own--Margaret smashes it in rage.
Here is where we really begin. Together, Margaret and Charles enter the crypt where John is buried. They pry open his casket, revealing a decaying corpse, and Charles reaches in and locates the key in his suit pocket. At this point I'm only wondering, why couldn't they have picked the lock, if they were going to make a run for it anyway? They return to the main house and try the key. The safe is empty.
John then appears to Margaret alone in her bedroom, peeking through her bed curtains. It's the same vision of his decaying corpse she saw in his coffin. What's interesting about this is that is isn't a jump scare. The whole thing happens slowly, and the corpse lingers for an uncomfortably long time. Naturally, Margaret shoots at it.
The next time John's corpse appears it is only to Charles, who finds him hanging ceiling. The irrelevance of this graphic image is striking. He never hanged, nor did he drip blood from a mysterious source onto the floor as he hanged. The face he's making is cartoonish--it's the very thing you imagine a hanging looking like when you're five years old.
After these encounters, the framing of the movie is suddenly much lighter. There are fewer shadows, it's more often daylight, and there's a beautiful view of the beach. This is reflective of Charles and Margaret's relationship at the time--although they are haunted, they are in it together and still in love. The priest bursts this bubble quickly. He becomes suspicious of Charles living there during Margaret's time of supposed grief when Margaret misses her own husband's funeral.
She resolves to visit his grave by herself in full mourning attire and lovely clashing red roses. Kneeling in front of his grave--where he is not buried, because he is in a crypt--she hears the slow melody of the music box. It begins to follow her, and only she can hear it.
The dark lighting returns, as does the thunderstorm mirroring that of the first scene, signaling that the climax is approaching. Charles and Margaret are in the mansion when the classic haunting begins. Curtains whisp, the chandelier swings, and objects smash for no reason. Margaret is visibly much more affected than Charles. She quickly becomes suspicious that he stole the money and planned to run off alone, without her.
She finds something of John's that shows her the money may really be located under his grave. Alone and suspicious, she goes back into the crypt. I love the repeat of this scene, in a completely different context. Still in the search for the money, but no longer trusting Charles and having to act on her own. She cuts her hand over something unidentifiable placed on his casket--it was too dark to tell what it was. And still, there was no money.
Dejected, she goes back into the mansion and finds that Charles, embarrassed by the priest, is packing his bags to leave. Margaret tips over a bag--it is completely filled with bills. Charles swears he doesn't know where they came from, that he loves her, he did not steal the money, and she doesn't believe him. She stabs him several, several, several times and burns the body. Katherine, the servant, watches the entire thing.
Here's where it really gets going.
With the way things went, Margaret goes upstairs to her husband's bedroom and drinks the remainder of his poison, waiting for it to kick in and kill her. John then comes out of his secret room behind the bookshelf, alive, and tells her that in fact, she didn't drink poison. He switched the bottles around, and she actually drank a liquid that will paralyze her from the waist down. And by the way, he faked his death.
John goes into a villainous monologue about what he plotted for Margaret. It was the maid, Katherine, who ran off with the money after all, not Charles. She killed him for no reason. When the maid enters the room and finds them, John thanks her for everything she did to try and prevent his murder, then promptly shoots her dead. He explains too Margaret that he had already called the police, and planned to frame Margaret for Katherine's murder.
Victorious, smug, he takes a swig out of a bottle of gin. Margaret begins laughing hysterically--John had previously switched out all the liquids, and the "gin" he thought he drank was actually poison. He begged Margaret for the antidote, and she almost gives it to him, but drops it, spilling into the carpet.
The police arrive, and in his final moments John slips back into his secret room to die, possibly for real. They find Margaret sitting in John's wheelchair over the maid's body and carry her out the door. Margaret laughs the whole way down.
