If Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, how bad would it be if that woman was a ghost? According to Ghost Story, that would be very bad indeed for those responsible for her scorn. In the movie, the ghost is Alma (Alice Krige), and she’s been giving a group of old men nightmares for years. These men, who collectively go by the name of the Chowder Society, meet once a month to tell each other ghost stories. The group includes Ricky (Fred Astaire), John (Melvyn Douglas), Edward (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) and Sears (John Houseman). How Alma and the Chowder Society are connected is the central mystery of the story, and I don’t want to give that away up front. It involves an ill-fated summer romance when all parties were much younger, which led to an accident that became an unspeakable tragedy. Despite their best efforts to put what happened behind them, the past has not stayed in the past.
When she’s not haunting the dreams of septuagenarians, Alma is seducing Edward’s twin sons Don and David. Both are played by Craig Wasson, who cornered the market in the Eighties as a rumpled object of desire for women out of his league. David’s shocking death is described as a suicide, but Don knows better. He slept with Alma before his brother did, and he suspects she played a role in his death. Edward won’t hear of it, but then he soon meets his own curious death. Eventually, Don finds an old photo that points to a connection between the woman he knows as Alma and another woman named Eva that the Chowder Society met in their college days. Could the two women be the same? Of course! This movie is titled Ghost Story, after all.
After John dies from an apparent heart attack, Sears and Ricky finally fess up, telling Don about their fateful encounter with Eva all those years ago and how their actions led to her death. What happened way back when was a true comedy of errors, but men were a bit touchy about not being able to “perform” back then. When the reason for Eva’s death is finally revealed, you will be hard-pressed not to sympathize with her desire for revenge. The only question is, why did she wait so long?
The selling point of Ghost Story apparently was having four legendary elderly actors play the haunted old-timers. The quartet consists of Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and John Houseman. Houseman is reliably good and one of the highlights in the movie. As for the other three distinguished gentlemen, their acting ranges from fine to terrible. Alice Krige, who plays the ghost in this story, is beguiling and creepy. Craig Wasson plays the loser everyman to a tee. The movie, a loose adaptation of Peter Straub’s novel, has enough holes in it to drive a snow plow through. Even still, the movie is stylish, sexy and campy enough to make it an entertaining watch. Mildly Recommended.
What I remembered
- Craig Wasson’s full-frontal, free-falling death in the beginning.
- Alice Krige walking around naked.
- John Houseman playing John Houseman.
- Philippe Sarde’s score
- The Chowder Society
- Krige’s character somehow being alive in a submerged car at the end of the movie.
I mostly remembered Ghost Story as a story about a sexy ghost who inexplicably finds Craig Wasson’s character desirable. After he rejects her, she proceeds to kill off his twin and several old guys who refer to themselves as the Chowder Society. They tell each other scary stories as a way of punishing themselves for the sin they committed together in their youth. In the end, they stop the ghost from killing Wasson’s character by pulling the car she drowned in out of a frozen pond. When the car door is opened, her decaying body falls out and she’s finally able to rest in peace.
Analysis
Whittling down a sizable novel into a screenplay for a movie running less than two hours must be a difficult job. That job is even more challenging when the novel is a popular one like Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. If you leave something out, fans are bound to be disappointed. I learned the “one page equals one minute on the screen” adage when I took a screenplay writing course in college. With that in mind, there was no possible way for writer Lawrence D. Cohen to retain everything from a 483 page novel in a 110 page screenplay. Although he tries his best, the resulting plot is disjointed and confusing, and what Cohen kept often feels arbitrary.
The movie probably makes more sense if you’ve read the book. That way, your memory can fill in the plot holes, which in this movie are significant. Roger Ebert, who stated he’d read the book in his review, described the movie as good and awarded it three stars. Since I haven’t read the book myself, I found the movie is difficult to follow, with frequent lapses in logic that defy explanation, even for ghost stories.
In the early going, Ricky (Fred Astaire), John (Melvyn Douglas) and Edward (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) have several sweaty nightmare scenes. For some reason Houseman’s Sears doesn’t have one. Instead, the movie shows him pacing with a drink in hand. My guess is that Houseman found those scenes undignified and refused to be shown thrashing around in sheets with a wet face. Given how silly the other gentlemen end up looking in them, this was a wise decision on his part.
The nature of the Chowder Society is never clear. The movie establishes that the guys get together once a month to tell each other ghost stories. Did they decide to do this after they accidentally killed Eva, or were they performing this ritual before her death? What did they do as a group aside from chasing after Eva? Why is Houseman the only member we see telling ghost stories? I kept waiting for Astaire to join in, recounting a story titled, “The Ghost Who Danced”.
The early scenes between Edward and Don prolong the inevitable revelation that Alma is actually Eva, who died decades earlier. Edward strangely criticizes his son Don the second he lays eyes on him, which makes it impossible for the two of them to talk openly to each other later on. I didn’t buy the criticism, because being a professor is a well-paying job. At dinnertime, Don’s hackles are up and he tosses the fact that he and his brother slept with the same woman in his father’s face. If Edward hadn’t insulted Don originally, they could have had a rational conversation about that coincidence and what role it played in David’s death.
The beginning of the movie is incredibly confusing. The first twenty minutes proceed as follows:
- four old men have nightmares
- Sears tells a ghost story to his friends
- David falls to his death
- David’s twin brother Don comes to New England at his father’s request.
- Don’s funeral
- More nightmare scenes
- Edward acts nice to Don
- Edward walks around town and eventually falls off the bridge.
The first act is obviously geared towards grabbing our attention. The sudden appearance of Eva’s rotting corpse is shocking, but the overall execution is unnecessarily clumsy. The only element of the plot that makes sense is that a ghost is scaring people to death. The story is obtuse because it delays explaining for why anything happens until the third act.
The story is set in a small, quirky Northeastern town, which naturally implies that odd things happen on a regular basis. However, the things that happen in this town boggle the mind. Edward wanders around the town in broad daylight in his night clothes. Edward’s curious death (falling off the bridge into the river below) is explained away as an accident due to a sudden onset of confusion. The police learn that there are two escaped mental patients living in an abandoned house, but they only send one officer there to investigate. Must be something in the chowder.
Regarding the story’s two lunatics on the run, how Gregory and Fenny fit into the story is a mystery. We’re told that Gregory was in an occult order in California and escaped from a state mental hospital. Was the hospital in California or New England? How did Eva find them, or vice versa? Are Gregory and Fenny related? Gregory claims that Eva can grant them everlasting life by helping her. How will she make good on that promise?
Don’s relationship with Alma is ridiculous. Although he already has a girlfriend, Don forgets all about her after seeing Alma. Don and Alma hit it off so well, they make passionate love to each other the night after they first meet. I wondered if Krige suffered a sprained neck when Don pushed her down to the floor during their sex scene. Guys who look like Craig Wasson know they should never look a gift horse in the mouth, but Don breaks things off with Alma because she walks around naked at night and says ominous things like, “I will show you things you have never seen. I will take you places you’ve never been. And I will see the life run out of you.” Alma is beautiful and loves Don, and he should feel lucky that she ever noticed him. If Don were an item at a second-hand store, his tag would be $5 marked down from $10. What’s even funnier is that Don is the reason why David and the old guys die. If he did the honorable thing and married his freaky girlfriend, everyone would still be alive.
Alma behaves either normally or creepy, for no apparent reason. This was not Krige’s fault, as she was portraying the character as dictated by the script. Her wild mood swings do move the plot forward, albeit in arbitrary ways. Why does she seek out Don in Florida at that particular time? Why not seek her revenge sooner? As a character, how can she physically manifest herself to the point where everyone can see her and she can hold a steady job? She switches between being a living person and a ghost according to the needs of the plot. When she angrily tells Don, “You don’t know anything!” I agreed with her. Whether she’s a ghost or not, her behavior is so erratic I wondered if she had a brain injury.
When I first saw this movie decades ago, I didn’t understand the issue young Edward had with Eva in the bedroom. Watching the movie years later, I completely understand why Eva was pissed when the guys showed up drunk at her doorstep in the middle of the night. Edward, the man she chose to sleep with, couldn’t get it up but brags to his friends as if he did. When Eva tries to set the record straight, Edward knocks her unconscious. I wondered why he needed to act so angrily at that moment. What’s a little performance anxiety amongst friends? The chowder heads then put her in a car and submerge it into a pond to cover up the crime. In the moment before the car goes under water, she awakens but it’s too late to save her. Why she waited so many years to exact her revenge is the real mystery.
Speaking of injuries, how could the Chowder Society’s aspiring doctor not detect Eva’s pulse? I’m assuming that he wasn’t able to do that because he was in a panic at the time, but if that’s true, how did he ever become a doctor? He would need to be able to perform in stressful situations.
Miscellaneous
Craig Wasson has to have been one of the luckiest actors working in the early Eighties. As with 1984’s Body Double, he cornered the market playing rumpled losers who managed to bed the most desirable women around.
While the first three are silver-haired silver screen legends, Houseman really doesn’t fit the mold. He didn’t become a professional actor until he was seventy-one, when his performance in 1973’s The Paper Chase made him the go-to actor to play pompous blowhards. Based on his performance here I would have paid to listen to him tell ghost stories.
Fred Astaire, not known for dramatic roles, mostly looks uncomfortable in this movie. Unfortunately, this was his last role. I wish I was familiar with his song-and-dance movies, because it feels strange to remember him for a movie where he has to deliver clunky lines of dialog like:
You’re dissembling. It's beneath you.
I was just thinking that sidewalks have changed the world.
With the flashback scenes set in the Twenties, there had to be scenes with characters singing a long-forgotten song. The younger Chowder Society’s song of choice is “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi”, which is a memorable song.
Ironically, Edward couldn’t make love to Eva but winds up being the only member of the group to have children.
How could Eva possibly be alive in the pond after all those years?
How was the tow truck driver able to find the car at the bottom of a frozen pond?
Sarde’s score is tense, spooky, sexy and haunting, with a touch of bombast thrown in for good measure. Hearing it again after all these years was a treat.
Detroit Cineaste 