Directed By: Lewis Allen

MVPs: Gail Russell, Ray Milland, Cornelia Otis Skinner, Donald Crisp, Ruth Hussey, Barbara Everest, Alan Napier, Dorothy Stickney

Plot: Middle-age gadabouts, Rick Fitzgerald and sister Pam, simply must have the old Windward house after their cutie terrier harasses the local rodentia. But dontchaknowit? This was the accursed site where the Meredith matriarch plummeted from the sea cliffs to a watery doom not but seventeen years ago! Soon young Stella herself is compelled, driven by deoxyribonucleic urge or eerie malevolence, to those same escarpments that claimed her mother! Suffice to say, things get ghostly and everyone gets more than they bargained for. True love.

Response: O, creeping ectoplasm! Fort Bragg for Cornwall! The room is evil. Mold permeates its core. Its walls cheeselike. The house is made of cheese. Milton Bradshaw of 2623 Maple Lane bellows, “Get thee behind me Satan!” Hurls the candles all higgledy-piggledy. When authorities ask him later, wherefore he got such queer ideas, the 43-years-long employee of Sanderson & Sons replies, “uninvited, uninvited, uninvited…”

Review: This film is tailor-made for a Sunday afternoon. Light and easy but with enough sickly wrongness to give the skeeves. Not a challenging picture, or a difficult picture. Not an earth-shatteringly miraculous picture. Just a noirish, lite, ghost-chamber-drama with all the mastery and competence of old Hollywood on display. It won’t rock your world like Cat People or make you a monster junkie. But the stars are pretty, the interior’s lavish, the politics fairly progressive, the ghostliness eerie.

Ray Milland is not as charming as Cary Grant by and eighth or as funny as Don Knotts, but he’s good enough. Kinda bro-town and the most uninteresting part but handles being the romantic hero and doing a few guh-guh-guh-GHOST bits.

There’s some good twists and turns too.

One of the areas in which I’m tres square is in my militant anti-AI politics and I see the made-for-streaming movies as being emblematic of that larger trend of busying our bodies and minds with digital saturation and the cerebral shutting-off of wonder, curiosity, exploration, blah blah. Earlier this year, Laura and I watched the new Witherspoon and Will Ferrel romcom You’re Cordially Invited because we like those two and we love Rory Scovel and we’re into dumb romcoms (if you’re ringing Paul Rudd, we’re picking up the phone). Why do I bring this all up in my Uninvited post? Only to say that I view this kind of film (Uninvited) as the antidote and replacement for that other type of entertainment (the made-for-streamer).

What is ironic about made-for-streaming movies (and Cordially Invited was fine, there were a few big laughs and a fair amount of smiles and the lighting was actually pretty good) is that for as zazzy as they can be, they are so boooring. And I think that’s because they are designed for you to not really watch them. They’re made for you to put on in the background and occasionally glance up at while you get GPT to write emails for you that make you sound like the same kinda soulless vacuum these types of films are largely emblematic of. Hey, maybe that’s a fine way to work and we all have different ways of processing but if you wanna watch something, really watch something maybe instead of picking a two-hour plus streamer with some stars you like engineered to fiiiilllll spaaaaaaaaace, choose instead a mid-tier 1940’s ghost flick created for your attention rather than lack of attention.

Idunno. Rant over. I gotta start taking better notes.

Background: They wanted to get Hitchcock to direct this. Of course they did.

The movie was written by Frank Partros and Dodie Smith (yes, I Remember the Castle, One-Hundred-and-One Dalmations, Dodie Smith) and based on Dorothy Macardle’s bestselling gothic novel Uneasy Foothold.

The film’s original composition “Stella by Starlight” became a jazz standard that Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, and Charlie Parker would all go on to perform.

Originally a Broadway theatre director, this was Lewis Allen’s first feature. He would work with Gail Russell again in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay and The Unseen, the latter of which was designed as a spiritual sequel to The Uninvited. Much of his subsequent work with Paramount, RKO, Warner Bros, and United Artists consisted of comedies and film noirs with the occasional swashbuckler thrown in. Eventually he directed for television, helming many episodes of Bonanza amongst other shows.

In the 80’s, he purportedly worked on a show that was devised to tour an Andy Warhol animatronic robot. The piece, Andy Warhol Overexposed: A No-Man Show was set to feature the bed-ridden Warhol dummy reading passages from the real Warhol’s diaries and Lewis, Warhol, and a Disneyland imagineer were hard at work on the production but stopped due to technical limitations.

Can Kid’s Watch It: I think it would be upsetting for littles but precocious seven year olds might really dig the coastal spell, cinematic craft, and nightmarish wonder. I’m just an uncle out here, no kids myself!

Halloween Score:

Autumn Vibes: 1/5

Scares & Chills: 2/5

Cultural & Cinematic Importance: 3/5

Monster Action: 1/5

Second Opinions:

"cold shiver melodrama at its best, and it uses no melodramatic claptrap or sliding panel hocus-pocus to achieve its cold chill ends"- Karl Krug of the Pittsburgh Sun Telegraph

“The Uninvited is even scarier than House of Wax [1953]. In fact, it’s the best ghost story ever made. It’s so frightening that Ray Milland has to crack a few jokes now and then, just to keep everybody in the theater.” - filmmaker Martin Scorcsese

“The Uninvited, through an adroit counterpointing, syncopating, and cumulation [sic] of the natural and the supernatural, turns a mediocre story and a lot of shabby clichés into an unusually good scare-picture.” - James Agee, The Nation

Where to Peep:

Internet Archive baybeee!

Hint for Tomorrow’s Movie:

It's another Paramount Picture.

Go ahead and guess in the comments below or slide into my DM’s. Get it right in three and I vow to buy you a Pumpkin-spice latte.