When I first saw GHOST STORY in the '80s, I thought it was one of the best stories of its type ever told.
Seeing it again tonight on cable, my opinion has changed. Yes, all the elements for a good tale of ghostly doings are in place--but they never really reach a satisfying enough pattern in the scheme of things.
The acting is excellent, the suspense is taut at times, but much of it spins along at too slow a pace before anything happens. The giggling schoolboys are rather tiresome in the flashbacks that reveal what happened to the woman they were all smitten with. As played by Alice Krige, she's an enigmatic seductress with a wicked gleam in her eyes and we never know quite what she is about to do. Craig Wasson does well with the role of a young man who encounters her, falls briefly for her and then leaves her when her neurotic ways become too much for him.
How she takes revenge on the four men who were responsible for her death is the comeuppance of the tale. Whether you're willing to watch until the bitter end without changing channels is another thing. On the other hand, this is not the sort of movie to watch with so many commercial interruptions breaking the mood.
Fred Astaire, John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Melvyn Douglas play the four old men who were drawn under the spell of a girl, seduced as they were by her charms. Each must confront their past deed as she exacts some sort of revenge on them--that is the nub of the plot, but it could have been so much better had the script been better developed.
I never read the novel, but I imagine it fills in the many gaps in the story that seem to be missing.
Seeing it again tonight on cable, my opinion has changed. Yes, all the elements for a good tale of ghostly doings are in place--but they never really reach a satisfying enough pattern in the scheme of things.
The acting is excellent, the suspense is taut at times, but much of it spins along at too slow a pace before anything happens. The giggling schoolboys are rather tiresome in the flashbacks that reveal what happened to the woman they were all smitten with. As played by Alice Krige, she's an enigmatic seductress with a wicked gleam in her eyes and we never know quite what she is about to do. Craig Wasson does well with the role of a young man who encounters her, falls briefly for her and then leaves her when her neurotic ways become too much for him.
How she takes revenge on the four men who were responsible for her death is the comeuppance of the tale. Whether you're willing to watch until the bitter end without changing channels is another thing. On the other hand, this is not the sort of movie to watch with so many commercial interruptions breaking the mood.
Fred Astaire, John Houseman, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Melvyn Douglas play the four old men who were drawn under the spell of a girl, seduced as they were by her charms. Each must confront their past deed as she exacts some sort of revenge on them--that is the nub of the plot, but it could have been so much better had the script been better developed.
I never read the novel, but I imagine it fills in the many gaps in the story that seem to be missing.