The Ghost and Mrs. Muir

CD Review by Jeff Bond

This CD came out in recently revived Fox Classics series on Varese Sarabande. We take a break from our daily discussions of new movies coming out to remind you that you should get it.

Music by Bernard Herrmann. Varese Sarabande VSD-5850. 33 tracks - 53:00

The treasures of Varèse Sarabande's Fox Classics series continue with Bernard Herrmann's beautiful romantic score for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. This has waited 50 years for its original tracks to be released, although Elmer Bernstein re-recorded a little over 40 minutes of the score for his Filmusic Collection in 1975, released on another Varèse disc, VCD 47254. Even in 1947, Herrmann was not known as a master of romance: his first scores (Citizen Kane, The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Magnificent Ambersons, and Hangover Square) had all been dominated by the dark themes that would follow the composer throughout his career. Even 1944's Jane Eyre was more a gothic melodrama than a romance, with Herrmann's stormy score perfectly characterizing the windswept moors and shadowy secrets of Charlotte Bronte's Thornfield. Anna and the King of Siam (1946) had proved Herrmann capable of composing for the brighter atmosphere of a period romance, but The Ghost and Mrs. Muir brought Herrmann back to the sort of subject matter he thrived on: obsession, unrequited love, and the supernatural.

Herrmann's themes and motifs for Ghost rank among his most memorable and effective. Bookending the music is an undulating figure for woodwinds, flute and harp which characterizes the endless crashing of surf along the English coast: it's a steady, subtle pulse that somehow evokes both time and timelessness as Gene Tierney falls into a relationship with the ghost of a sea captain played by Rex Harrison.

The theme for Tierney's character, Lucy, is a gently descending melody for strings that is beautiful yet uncompromising in capturing the woman's essential loneliness as a widow whose one potential love affair with a living man (a duplicitous George Sanders) is doomed to failure. The theme for the ghostly Captain Gregg, the woman's only confidant, bubbles out of the sea itself, with his warm, nostalgic memories of life on the sea eventually evoked by a gentle, consumately Herrmannesque sea shanty often voiced by low woodwinds or flutes. The textures and tempos are so determinedly melancholy that the score's occasional bursts of more energetic material involving some comic meddling in-laws, or Tierney's train trip to London, comes across as almost shocking.

With its fantastic subject matter, the film moved Herrmann to both echo his musical past and foreshadow the approaches he would take in the less-lyrical fantasies later in his career. The Devil and Daniel Webster makes its presence felt in several cues: in the pulsing, busy brass rhythms of "Exit" and in Herrmann's comic treatment of the "In-Laws" and "Pranks" with droll contrabassoon commentary. In "The Painting" and the score's climactic passage-of-time montage, Herrmann employs the repeated, descending two-note phrase he often used to evoke the fantastic in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Journey to the Center of the Earth and his scores for Ray Harryhausen's films.

The core of the film and Herrmann's score is not fantasy, however, but the realities of time and thwarted hopes: the warm reading of Gregg's sea shanty as he reminisces in "About Ships"; Herrmann's beautiful accompaniment to the captain's sympathetic collaboration with Tierney in "Lucia" and "Dictation"; the way harps foreshadow the story's conclusion as they insinuate themselves into Lucy's theme in "Spring Sea"; and the explosion of grief as Lucy discovers her living romantic suitor is a married philanderer in "Sorrow."

As Lucy retreats into a solitary life and old age, Herrmann lets loose with a torrential, violent accompaniment to the film's montage of shoreline imagery, as the sea washes decades away to reach the end of the woman's life in "The Passing Years." A highlight of this album which was unrecorded in Bernstein's 1975 album is "Andante Cantabile," a gorgeous, three-minute cue featuring a pulsing, beautifully recapitulating string melody that intervenes before the movie's final moments as the aged, dying Lucy is reunited with Gregg as a timeless, immortal beauty. Someone once wrote that a good screen romance can never end happily, and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir manages to both reinforce and refute that statement with a romance that can only reach a happy consummation in death. For the dark-humored, driven and intensely sentimental Herrmann, there couldn't have been a more perfect conclusion, and his finale here is one of his greatest accomplishments.

The restoration of this great score at the hands of Nick Redman and Rick Victor brings this 50-year-old music back with remarkable clarity, to the point where some musician's noise is even present in a few cues.