Take that, Bembridge Scholars

Well. Just re-watched this still-delightful romp from Stephen Somers and crew and I can say it holds up well. Just getting ready to celebrate its 20th Anniversary, so it is worth looking at its stamina.

If you are one of those Digital SFX nerds then, well, never mind. The Digital SFX were great in 1999 and today look like crap. But, who cares? Good films are about story, character, acting and perhaps the visuals. And the visuals are actually pretty great, if a bit cheesy. Is it even important to re-cap the very, very simple plot? It is the plot of every Mummy movie: Europeans/Americans dig up a previously long-buried sarcophagus, and really, really bad stuff ensues.

The main event here is the breezy, well-written script and the solid casting. On the one hand you have the swarthy Brendan Fraser at the height of his career (where is he now, BTW?) and on the other the Oscar-winning Rachel Weisz in a role she might have come to regret she ever took, early in her career. Its hard to imagine the same actress who played Ralph Fiennes's dead wife in "The Constant Gardener" making cow eyes at Fraser, but, well, there you have it.

This film is just plain fun, unless you don't like resurrected Mummies turning to sand and blowing out of hotel room windows when cute little cats are held up to them. And who doesn't?

Shiver me timbers, its the loveliest actress of Hollywood's Golden Age

There is so much to say about this "sparkling" romantic 'comedy' from what is truly the "Golden Age of Hollywood." But, so little...er, cloud storage. What? I have personal connections to the film and DVD (image is from the Fox re-issue), and critical interest in the film itself. Let's break this up into those two categories.

Personal connection. When I was growing up in LA the television show, 'The Ghost and Mrs. Muir' was one of the shows I watched. On Broadcast TV. Using a TV antenna. Yes, I am that old. So, when I was made aware many years later that the TV show was based on a classic film, I was all-in. Personal connection, part deux. I have the very good fortune to be married to a lovely lady who used to work at Fox Television. When I would visit her we would walk from the so-called 'Die Hard Tower' where her cubicle was and visit the Studio, where we could lunch in perhaps the most famous Commissary still standing. Even better, we could shop in the Studio Store and get some meaningful percentage off our purchases. There I stumbled across this wonderful item, the DVD version of the film re-issued under Fox's "Studio Classics" imprint, and including both a very good transfer from a high quality print, and numerous extras such as a marvelous A&E bio of the inimitable Rex Harrison.

But I digress. As I often do.

Critical interest. There are numerous 'ways in' to TG&MM I hardly know where to start. Maybe I should start by saying I loved it the first time I saw it, and I loved it, again, when I watched it last night. Although I really wanted to buy an HD video version on Amazon Prime I held back and inserted the DVD into my PS4 to see how good it would look on my Sony Bravia with surround. In its original 1:33:1 Aspect Ratio it looked, and sounded great, BTW, thanks to a decent upscaler on the PS4.

Fox assembled the 'A Team' for this one, Joseph L. Mankeiwicz as helmer, the late, great Bernard Herrmann doing what he did so well with the Score and a cadre of excellent folks doing photography, lighting, etc. But of course the main event here is Rex Harrison as the salty sea captain/ghost and the great Gene Tierney as Lucy Muir, along with one of my favorite under-the-Radar performers, George Sanders as the handsome 'RL' Lothario who nearly sweeps Lucy off of her feet. Plot is not complicated: Lucy is newly widowed, and, along with her young daughter takes a cozy sea cottage in a remote village on the coast of England. The first reel hasn't even hit the cigarette mark (lol) and said Salty Dog 'appears' to Lucy to try to re-claim his beloved home. This sets off a warm-hearted romance between widower and ghost that, on the surface seems pretty straightforward. Of course it isn't, and the complications that ensue are both conventional (for their time) and non-conventional.

Tierney is one of my favorite Hollywood stars because she played her females with a proto-Feminist tartness that was irresistible. In this story, she refuses to take the patronizing advice of the Leasing Office fellow and leases a haunted house, is very decidedly not afraid of no ghost (pre-figuring the recent all-female update of 'Ghostbusters', perhaps) and invites Gregg to match wits with her, and finally she waltzes in to a noted London publishing house to try to get a book published. It was not unusual in the early 1900s for a woman to do this, but it would have been unusual for her to have a story that wasn't about "women's issues" or the like. Lucy's co-written biography of a male sea captain subverts the conventions of the time, and tickles the fancy of the very male publisher, and all the while Tierney balances Lucy's of-her-time femininity with gender-neutral wiles.

As I said, a lot to talk about here. Let's just end with Sanders' strong turn as afore-mentioned real life love interest. Didn't we see this movie before? Yes, it was Hitchcock's 'Rebecca' and, ironically, Sanders was the third stool of a menage-a-trois with a woman who, in the film's present timeline, is now deceased. Rebecca 'haunts' Hitch's film in some very Gothic ways not dis similarly to how Harrison's Captain Gregg 'haunts' Gull Cottage. And Sanders chews the scenery as he sweeps Lucy off her feet, setting off a jealous streak in the Phantasmagorical Gregg - which injects yet more warm-hearted humor into this classic.

If you haven't seen it, get the to Amazon Prime - or buy the DVD (or Blu-ray if that is available).