The Ghost has plenty of Riccardo Freda's directorial problems. Once a director of top Italian popular classics, when Freda reached the horror genre he appeared to hit some level of burn-out, shooting only parts of films before jettisoning big sections of script, or leaving cameraman Mario Bava to finish up for him. His films are noted for isolated scenes of exquisite funereal creepiness surrounded by indifferent and slow-moving sections where the camera seems arbitrarily planted just to get the scene over with.

This is a fairly well-organized tale of murder with the expected hauntings that unnerve the killers and eventually lead to their undoing in as macabre a way as possible. There's a beautiful funeral scene as in the first Hichcock film, and frequent stunning closeups of Steele that one wishes one could frame. Just when things start looking sloppy, a great shot will appear to revive our interest - an extreme color design or careful composition, or an interesting idea like having the lens drip with blood as Steele lacerates her victim (us) with a straight razor.

The dubbing is better than usual and although there's no all-time great performance here like that of Robert Flemyng in the first picture, the four principal actors are good. Barbara Steele's acting is better than usual mainly because her character has a little more to convey than just looking scared or perfidiously sensual. Returnee Harriet White (Medin) contributes a less-mannered version of the same character. There's still the odd scene here and there that makes us think nobody was in charge, including one where Babs enters her bedroom and gets ready as if following step-by-step instructions from behind the camera. But her later breakdown scene is quite an achievement for her. She's more iconographically evil in Black Sunday and sexier in Castle of Blood, but this is one of her better "resumé" roles.

Phil Hardy goes over the deep end praising The Ghost's "delirious" visual qualities in his Encyclopedia of Horror movies, and gets the ending wrong too. The windup is a great combo of the end situation in Steele's Pit and the Pendulum, combined with a macabre variation on an un-filmed twist ending for Alfred Hitchcock's Suspicion, the one that actually got used for William Castle's noir When Strangers Marry. It reads better than the way Freda films it, but it's still pretty good.

Retromedia's DVD presents The Ghost on the same side of a disc with its co-feature, but the encoding is very good. There's none of the frame-blurring and blobbing in the black areas that plague some "professional" DVDs that I am beginning to think are sometimes literally homemade. The transfer is done on a good telecine, as evidenced by the slight distortion caused when splices go through the gate, as opposed to jumping in the image. There are many little bumps like that, but none that disturb the picture or interrupt the nicely cleaned-up audio track. The mix for this export English language version is crude but effective; the score appears to be a collection of borrowed tracks, as some very recognizable Roman Vlad cues from The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock are heard.

The color is not terrific but also not a washout. The contrast isn't good enough and can't be improved because the blacks are already crushed to a dark gray, with little or no detail in them. The film was originally released in Technicolor and I would guess that this is a good 16mm reduction from a 35mm Tech print, or a so-so negative made from a splicy 35mm Tech print. No, it's nothing like watching a really good color transfer, but we at least get a good idea of how beautiful the original was. It's as close as we can get for now.

As discussed recently on the web's The Mobius Forum, Retromedia has actually corrected a problem that was built into most of the 16mm-sourced versions of this movie. Astute viewers long ago noticed that the first two scenes were reversed, scrambling the sense of the titles. With a quick rearrangement, the movie now has a smooth opening instead of a "Huh?" stumble-start. In 1991 Savant tried to watch a Sinister Cinema VHS of this and gave up, it was so poor. This Retromedia copy is far better, even if it isn't going to win any awards.

Dead Eyes of London
Retromedia
1961 / B&W / 98 min. / Die Toten Augen von London
Starring Joachim Fuchsberger, Karin Baal, Dieter Borsche, Wolfgang Lukschy, Eddi Arent, Anneli Sauli, Klaus Kinski
Cinematography Karl Löb
Art Director Mathias Matthies, Ellen Schmidt
Editor Ira Oberberg
Original Music Heinz Funk
Written by Egon Eis from a novel by Edgar Wallace
Produced by Horst Wendlandt
Directed by Alfred Vohrer

The German popular thriller genre known as "krimi" hasn't been seen much in the United States. A Krimi is a medium budget program whodunnit picture that typically has a large cast of would-be killers and victims working their way through a bizarre series of crimes. Many are set in England, especially those based on books by Edgar Wallace.

This particular story was made once before in 1940 as The Dark Eyes of London aka The Human Monster, with Bela Lugosi playing two roles. Once again, a thriller is dressed up with gothic horror overtones, although there's nothing supernatural afoot this time. There's no horror star in sight (Lugosi was excellent in the Associated British original) but there is a hulking, hairy killer with a grotesque imbecilic grin to inspire nightmares.

The blindness gimmick is well-utilized to give the proceedings a gothic feel. ² The murders only occur in the thick London fog, and the central location is a homeless mission for single blind men that resembles something out of Dickens, or at least Fritz Lang's "M". Gentle reverend Dearborn plays Beethoven for his boarders, sometimes to block out the sounds of skullduggery elsewhere in his Thames-side establishment. Several characters have those spooky collodion eyes with no pupils that make blindness look like an eerie curse.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, The Ghost rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Fair ++
Sound: Very Good
Supplements: none
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: April 30, 2004