Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir & Calabria Bakery Pizza

Tuesday, February 03, 2015

You can be much more alone with other people than you are by yourself, even if it's people you love. That sounds all mixed up, doesn't it?
Mrs. Muir

Anybody turning on a TV and randomly tuning to Gone With the Wind would find it almost impossible not to linger or even see it to the end. There are some films like Gone With the Wind that are iconic for certain generations. My guess is that both of my daughters (in their 40s) would linger on Star Wars.

It may have been not too many years after The Ghost and Mrs. Muir was released in 1947, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and with Rex Harrison, Gene Tierney, George Sanders and a very young Natalie Wood, that I saw the film with my parents in Buenos Aires. There is one scene that became embedded in my brain and I anticipate it every time I see this film. Mrs. Muir, an old woman now sits at a wing chair and picks up her hot milk. You see her hand pick it up and then her hand droops and the glass falls to the floor.

Rex Harrison’s voice is as memorable as Tierney’s unearthly beauty.

After seeing it once I saw it again years later with my mother, then with my wife and then with my two daughters. Lately I gave the film to my eldest daughter who lives in Lillooet and she saw it one evening when her sister Hilary and daughter Lauren when they were there for a visit.

Just a few days after a dinner of homemade pizza (Calabria Bakery dough) Hilary, Lauren, Rosemary and I sat down in the den to see The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. This film is one of my Gone With the Wind type iconic films. I enjoy it every time and wonder where all those actors with wonderful voices have gone to. All I have to do is remember Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn in Robin and Marian to almost grieve at the loss of the great voices (well Connery is still with us).

But for me the real wonder is to watch Lauren, 12 and to realize that I was a lot younger when I saw The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and how wonderful that 65 years later there we are seeing it again. What would my mother have thought of Lauren her great granddaughter? Strange to see a film in which an older actress plays the very young Natalie Wood. When we first saw the film she was an unknown.

Next on the iconic lineup will be Laura.

The complete script for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Link to: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir & Calabria Bakery Pizza