By Michael van den Bos

The love story is like the ocean: it’s a genre that comprises an essential element covering movies the world over. The cinematic sea of love is most thrilling when the love boat rides on tempestuous emotional waves and only stays afloat if the romantic leads are of equal ballast somewhere in their temperament, ego, or spirit. This goes for such extreme cases as the fiery relationship between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, or the sweetly neurotic coupling of Annie Hall and Alvy Singer. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is a spirited love story that expertly navigates the deep, mysterious waters of romance between two unlikely lovers who couldn’t be more similar.

It is England, the turn-of-the-last-century. Mrs. Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney), newly widowed, leaves her controlling in-laws to start a new life with her young daughter. With her late husband’s money, Lucy purchases a quaint seaside cottage, even though she’s warned that it’s haunted. Lucy indeed discovers the cottage is haunted by the ghost of the cantankerous Capt. Gregg (Rex Harrison), but she’s not scared off. A living (and dead) accommodation is reluctantly agreed upon by Lucy and the captain. As tolerance leads from admiration through fondness, and finally to love, Lucy’s money runs out, so the captain helps her and her daughter by “ghostwriting” his salty seagoing adventures, which become a best-selling book. Along the way, Lucy falls in love with a living writer (George Sanders) who manipulates Lucy for his own pleasure, much to the pain of Capt. Gregg.

Rex Harrison defined the cliché of the crusty seadog who once led a seafaring life of wine, women, and song. Though his ghost wants his home to his own, the captain is captivated by Lucy’s timeless beauty, and then touched by her unsuspecting strength and determination to be neither controlled by irritating in-laws nor frightened by an annoying apparition. The captain’s spirit softens as he realizes Lucy is his kindred spirit; two unlikely people from different dimensions align their hearts because they not only share the same characteristics, but they also lovingly share what the other needs to voyage through life and the afterlife.

Gene Tierney was one of Hollywood’s great beauties who could act well with good material when guided by a strong director. Tierney’s felinelike visage has an ephemeral quality in Mrs. Muir, which is fitting for this supernatural love story, as opposed to her erotic and icy-cold mask as the evil wife in the great Technicolor film noir, Leave Her to Heaven.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz, one of Hollywood’s best screenwriters (All About Eve), elegantly directs from Philip Dunne’s droll script. Not usually noted as a visual master, Mankiewicz displays elegant style as crafted by Charles Lang Jr.’s sublime and haunting black-and-white photography (in which all love stories and ghost stories should be photographed).

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir is that rare Hollywood love story that balances romance, wit, and genuine sentiment into a completely charming film about transcending the physical plane to a spiritual solstice.

Duel (1971)—Directed by Steven Spielberg

By Michael van den Bos

In 1971, then 24-year-old Steven Spielberg directed a supercharged thriller about a trucker menacing an innocent motorist. That’s all there is to the story of Duel —essentially a cat-and-mouse chase with several tons of Detroit steel burning reams of rubber and gallons of gasoline along miles of California desert highway. This is arguably the first movie to portray road-rage on screen before the term existed, and it showcased the young Spielberg as a talented director with feature film ambitions.

As the world’s most famous and successful film director, Steven Spielberg had to start somewhere. That somewhere was at Universal Studios as a television director. Spielberg’s first professional gigs were directing episodes of Marcus Welby, M.D. , The Psychiatrist , and Columbo .

Itching to work out his cinematic muscles, Spielberg convinced Universal executives that he could direct Duel as an ABC-TV movie of the week. He promised he could make the film in ten days—a daunting schedule then as now. The Universal brass gave the kid with the brass balls the go-ahead, but with the condition that if he went over schedule he’d be replaced with a veteran director. Spielberg wrapped the TV movie in a little under two weeks. Replacement wasn’t necessary because Spielberg’s footage displayed an extraordinary talent and a keen visual eye.

The script was written by Richard Matheson, based on his short story. Matheson was a sci-fi/horror writer who wrote some of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone . Dennis Weaver is David Mann, a beleaguered family man who’s driving his red Valiant from Los Angeles to a business meeting across the desert. A truck begins to tailgate David. He eventually allows the anonymous driver to pass, but this gesture backfires as the trucker uses his rig to slow David down, cut him off, and then deliberately run him off the road. David is thrown into manic hysteria as it becomes obvious that this truck is targeting him for roadkill.

Duel is a tight thriller that owes much to Hitchcock. The David Mann character is an obvious archetype of the average Joe, and Spielberg gets you to identify with the character as Hitchcock would by keeping your attention squarely on Weaver’s performance. He offers only glimpses of the terrorist truck driver as Mann sees him—boots walking behind the oily tanker’s tires, or an arm waving Mann to pass—if he dare. The spirit of Hitchcock also infects Duel ’s beautifully realized suspense and the film’s basic theme of an ordinary man caught in an extraordinary circumstance. David’s banal life literally spins out of control into motor madness.

Duel is essentially a silent film. There’s very little dialogue, and if it weren’t there, you could still follow the story. Even so, the sound-effects design and the aggressive “music-noise” score by Billy Goldenberg—at times reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock scores—rev up the fear and the anxiety that are remarkable in a TV movie.

Duel gave Steven Spielberg a clear highway to show off his thrilling cinematic colors that foreshadowed the movie muscle cars of Jaws , Raiders of the Lost Ark , and Jurassic Park .