Cosy supernatural horror? There is such a thing and here it is in the shape of 1944’s The Uninvited, a strange mix of the jaunty and the spooky, a dialled-down take on the sort of comic horror that Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard had piloted to box-office glory in The Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers.
Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey play a brother and sister who happen upon a vast and lovely house on a cliff edge in Cornwall while down from London on holiday. Falling instantly in love with it, they seek out its owner, the starchy Commander Beech, who lets them have it for a song. What’s wrong with the place, Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald josh breezily, is it haunted or something?
And that, give or take, is the question answered by the plot, which uncovers skeletons in the cupboard of Commander Beech and his comely daughter, Stella, who Roderick invites to the house her mother used to live in until she hurled herself over the cliff one night years before. It’s a strange way of wooing Stella, which is what Roderick is up to, but then this is a strange film.
Is the mother’s unquiet spirit the source of the moaning Roderick and Pamela hear in the night? Why does the Fitzgeralds’ terrier, Bobby, run away first chance he gets? What’s spooking Whiskey, the cat belonging to the superstitious Irish housekeeper Lizzie Flynn (Barbara Everest)? Perhaps more importantly, why don’t either Pamela or Roderick seem at all frightened?
It shouldn’t really work and yet it does. Milland, never the most charismatic of actors, does a good job here as the bluff and blustering Roderick. Hussey is the no-nonsense sister organising seances and the like to try and flush out an answer. Donald Crisp plays the hostile Commander as his name suggests. The 20-year-old Gail Russell gets an “and introducing…” credit, and would be dead of alcoholism aged only 36, but she is an attractively bouncy Stella, all gosh-wow enthusiasm and, like the Fitzgeralds, intrigued rather than frightened by the suggestion of supernatural goings-on.
Spookiest thing in it by far is the strange Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner), who runs a nearby high-end asylum and was very close to Stella’s dead mother. Just how close is suggested by an absolutely huge portrait of the dead woman Miss Holloway has hanging in her office. “Mary was a goddess, her skin was radiant and the bright bright hair,” Holloway says of her dead friend. That “Miss” is doing a lot of (coded) work.
If you go along with some of the more adventurous readings, then all the women in this movie are lesbians – a sister living with her brother, a young woman of 20 still at home with grandpa, the unattached housekeeper even?
Perhaps that’s all a bit fanciful but the subtext does add something, doesn’t affect the plot too strenuously and isn’t allowed to get in the way by director Lewis Allen, who directs with the sort of panache you might not expect from a debut feature director.
Much of the mood is generated by lighting ace Charles Lang, who drapes shadow all over the place and gives the whole thing a patina of smoothness – he’d do similar great work in classics like The Big Heat and Charade.
It being more murder mystery than supernatural horror, there is an “explains it all” ending, when revelation follows revelation in scenes that are so fraught they’re funny. That also explains the half-heartedness of the ghostly special effects – miasmatic shapes here and there – which are effective in an unremarkable way. It’s a strange supernatural thriller that isn’t particularly interested in the supernatural part of the equation, but here you are.
Think a live-action Scooby Doo and that’s about the tone of the thing. It was a big hit back in 1944 and it stands up well today. As for the sequel, The Unseen, a thriller written by Raymond Chandler, that surely has also got to be worth chasing down.
The Uninvited – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
