Ruth Hussey

The Great Gatsby

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Jay and Daisy face to face

This is The Great Gatsby no one talks about. Not the Baz Luhrmann one from 2013, or the Robert Redford one from 1974, but the 1949 version starring Alan Ladd as Jay Gatsby, the poor boy made good who’s trying to chummy up to old money and finds it comes at a cost. In 1949, films about the jazz age were largely off-limits and so to get this film made, a moralising preamble and postscript was added – as if F Scott Fitzgerald’s original book weren’t a cautionary tale to start with. Ask AI to summarise the difference between this film and the book, as I just did, and it really goes off … Read more

The Uninvited

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Roderick holds Stella in his arms while Pamela looks on

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 … Read more