Film Clips

1981, USA, John Irvin

Adapting a popular book is not a rewarding task. Fans of the book will be lining up to bash the film because it missed out their favourite bits, re-arranged events or just didn’t capture the mood of the text. On the other hand, if a film is too faithful to the book, it may not have any individual life at all - see most of the Merchant-Ivory films for ample evidence of this, particularly their adaptations of Henry James which capture every single letter and absolutely none of the spirit. Sometimes, the film just misses by miles - the best example of this being the adaptation of The Magus which totally missed the point - which is that the point of that epic dissertation on magic and mysticism actually comes down to two people talking on a park bench. As a general rule, the best way to go may be to read the book, take some characters and the bare bones of the plot  and then forget about the book and make a proper film, rather like Kubrick did with The Shining.

Peter Straub’s Ghost Story may not be a great book, but it is a very entertaining horror novel, with much more attention to character and setting than your average popular fiction. It mixes up the nineteenth century ghost story tradition with late twentieth century horror and manages to work in its own right. Straub doesn’t always make the big set-piece scenes as effective as they should be, but his dialogue is crisp and funny, and he is very good at sinister asides. The bleakness of the winter is well evoked too.

The film of Ghost Story should have been good. It doesn’t follow the book very closely, keeping the central theme and losing the incidentals, but it has a good cast, an experienced writer and a promising director. John Irvin made the brilliant BBC adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - like Ghost Story, a piece about ageing men delving into the dark secrets of the past. Yet, something goes wrong with the film and it never recovers.

The story concerns four old men who have met every month for fifty years to tell each other ghost stories. This ritual seems to be protecting some terrible secret of what they did as young men, and by deliberately spooking themselves, they manage to keep the terror of the past in its place. The men are played by four of Hollywood’s finest; Fred Astaire, John Houseman, Melvyn Douglas and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Of this quartet, Melvyn Douglas comes off best - still working regularly at the time, he had done superb bits in Being There and The Changeling. Astaire tries hard, but seems unnaturally subdued, and let’s face it, he reached his last career peak in 1957 with Silk Stockings. Houseman booms his lines in the way he always did, but never gets near the pompous but sentimental character that Sears James is in the book. Fairbanks has hardly anything to do, which is fortunate since he appears very ill in his short scenes. Still, all four men are professionals, and they manage to keep the interest even when the film is falling apart towards the end.

One of the old men, Edward Wanderley (Fairbanks), has received news that one of his sons has died, falling out of a window in what has been described as an accident. But we know differently, since we saw him before his death, terrified by a woman whose face seems to have turned into a rotting corpse. This corpse image is constantly repeated throughout the film, and has a certain shock value the first couple of times, but eventually becomes ludicrous. Wanderley’s other son,  arrives back to see his father in the small town of Milburn where he grew up, and where the old men are still the elders of the community. He finds his father is in a bad state, but puts it down to the obsession with ghost stories. Both of his sons are played by Craig Wasson, who isn’t exactly a bad actor, but who is devoid of charisma. He doesn’t noticeably differentiate the two brothers, which doesn’t really matter because neither does the script.

Anyway, Edward dies after falling off a bridge, having followed a mysterious woman who he seems to recognise. We see that his accident was caused by his shock at seeing the face turn into a rotting corpse, mirroring his son’sexperience. His surviving son joins the rest of the Chowder Society to try to find out what is going on. It turns out that he had a passionate affair with the same woman who his brother was with at the time of his death. She was claiming to be called “Anna Mobeley”. Meanwhile, this same woman is setting up house in a deserted shack just outside town…

At this point, the novel begins to weave a clever tale around this central woman, who appears to be some sort of feral force of evil, revenging herself on the men who attempted to destroy her. The film, not knowing how to cope with the idea of monstrous evil -  all the more terrifying because it has some justification for its anger - turns its back on the tantalisingly dark sexual connotations inherent in the material and decides instead to turn the woman into a sort of shape-shifting zombie/ghost/witch. This creature has the power to turn into a rotting corpse at a moment’s notice - this idea would have been pretty effective if linked to the old men who are near to becoming corpses themselves, but the film just treats it as an excuse for shock moments. Luckily, she is portrayed by Alice Krige, an excellent actress whose career slid rapidly downhill after this. She is not exactly beautiful, but she is very striking and she has the ambiguity that is necessary to paper over the cracks in the script. Her non-verbal performance has to, in effect, supply the characterisation which is not written for her.

After the story told by Wanderley’s son, we get a very effective scene of escalating terror, as Douglas meets his death. Following a frightening dream, he wakes up to find that the horror of his dream has leaked into reality. He attacks his housekeeper, thinking her to be the demon that is obsessing him, but wakes up just in time to avoid killing her. This is all familiar stuff, but it’s very well edited, and Douglas gives a moving and convincing performance of panic and blind terror. The demonic woman has come to visit him, and he dies of shock. It is at this point that the film, finally starting to get some momentum, falls apart. It has already left the book behind - the stories we hear from the society are trivial stuff indeed, especially when compared to the pastiches of nineteenth century ghost stories in the book, and the character of Gregory Bate, a ghoul who returns to haunt Sears James, is thrown away as a thug from central casting.

We then get a long, long flashback, which explains the plot. Fifty years ago, we discover, the four men were obsessed by a woman called Eva Galli. She played games with them, taunting their emerging masculine ego and making pretty strong suggestions that she would be up for a bit of four on one action. The men, unable to cope with the open sexuality of this strong woman, kill her  - possibly by accident, but the film is vague as to the intention - and load her body into a car. They push the car into the river, but as it goes under, they see Eva screaming and clawing at the back window, apparently still alive. Anna Mobeley, it transpires, is Eva Galli’s vengeful spirit, determined to pay the men back for the crime they committed. All of this is powerful and suggestive material that is thrown away since it is so tediously paced that the viewer is more likely to nod off than nod with renewed understanding.

Rarely can there have been a more wasted opportunity. Straub’s original material is not only full of ideas, it is also vividly cinematic. The book contains a wonderful moment when two characters fight in front of a screen showing Night of the Living Dead, and a brilliant scene of the woods becoming a nightmarish fantasy for one of the old men. None of this material is used, and the characterisation is rudimentary. The older actors are used for their faces and never get much of a chance to show any personality beyond their traditional personas. Krige would be brilliant in a decent adaptation, but isn’t given much to do. Craig Wasson is, as usual, a drag on the film. He was a drag in Body Double too, but at least that had some bravura DePalma business to keep the eye occupied. This is so arbitrarily slung together that it looks like a cut-down TV series. Irvin has made decent films since this - although only Hamburger Hill is memorable - and I suspect he was at the mercy of his producer for much of the time, but that doesn’t excuse creating a film which is so, well, nothing.

The pacing is off - the first half is quite enjoyable, but it gets bogged down in the flashback scenes - and there is no imagination in the cliched horror set-ups. Jack Cardiff is a great cinematographer - he made Rambo a memorable visual experience even while the brain died for lack of nourishment - but this gives him little chance to shine, although the late twenties flashback has a nice “Gatsby” sheen to it. The music is awful - I misread the credit as “Pino Donaggio”, but was mistaken. Donaggio is self-parodic, but at least he has some style. Philippe Sarde did this score, presumably jotting it down on the back of a bus ticket.

All of which begs the question - can Straub be successfully adapted to the screen ? Full Circle, based on The Haunting Of Julia, had some nice moments, but was disappointing. None of his other books have been made into films - although Shadow Land is very cinematic, and The Throat was one of the best thrillers of the nineties…