The Spirit Is Willing

I noticed a lot of people wishing there was a way to purchase a copy of this movie. I found a site online that sells rare and classic movies and stuff like that...and they carry this one. Plus, the DVD is only like $12.

Go to - http://store.thesmallscreen.org/spiswi19dvd.html.

Plug that URL into your browser and see for yourself.

I saw the movie when I was really really little and had just written it off as my imagination until I found it here. It combines two things little kids are understandably intrigued by: ghosts and sex. It's comforting to know that I was not simply too imaginative as a child, that the things I swear I remember weren't just fantasies! IMDb validated me just a little.

I wish I was alive in the sixties. Because according to these people, the greatest problem of THEIR time was "the sex lives of ghosts," not crime and poverty. Nice.

I saw this on late night TV as a teenager, and remember certain cast members. That was the only way I was able to find this film in the database. I cross referenced Mary Wickes with the butterfly collector on a Gilligan's Island episode. His name escaped me then, but it is John McGiver. Recently I bought a copy of the original book, and it was well written. The basic plot is the same, but Castle's comedic treatment did take away from the scarier aspects of the story. Incidentally Nathaniel Benchley, the author of the book was the father of Jaws author Peter Benchley. Humorist Robert Benchley was Nathaniel's own father. I keep requesting this to play on Turner Classic Movies to play it, but I doubt it is classic enough. Maybe if they do a b-series of William Castle gimmick films it will fit the format. Paramount handles distribution of it. Maybe it will come out on DVD some day...

***Update*** I bought the eastern European import DVD from a Florida company, and watched it today. It is as amusing as I remember -- very much in the "spirit" of the madcap sixties decade in which it was made.

As is often the case, it pales in comparison to the original media. But that argument is so old its cliché. I'd like to see the book made into a true horror movie, but that's for a different forum than this. If this movie ever is released on DVD in the USA, I expect it to go straight to the $5.50 discount bin. But I do bet it gets snatched up by people like us. Us being the people that look up this movie on IMDb.

I was sure I'd imagined this movie until I found it here. I remember watching it on TV as kid and loving it. I imagine it doesn't hold up much nowadays, though.

The theme song will ring around in my head every now and then; it was an infectuous tune with a tinkly harpsichord. "The spirit is willing... Her kisses are chilling... "The spirit is willing... But the body is weak..."

I'd love to see it again.

Ninteenth Century. A lone seaman stands on a cliff. An elderly captain approaches. He points to the house and the seaman looks through his telescope, spying the captain's spinster daughter, Felicity. When we are shown Felicity, grinning broadly through the telescope, we hear a squawking seagull. She has great inner beauty, her father says. The man who marries her would be in charge of my entire fleet, he promises. The seaman looks through the telescope again and when we see Felicity, grinning and waving, the seagull sqawks once more.

Felicity was played by an old comedic actress named Cass Daley, who was Olive Oyl come to life, pure cartoon. Even more the seaman who marries her for her money is none other than Robert Donner, best known for the madman Exedor on Mork and Mindy. On their wedding night, as Felicity frolicks in bed waiting for her man, Donner has gone to the maid's room, just off the kitchen and beside the basement. With no dialogue in this entire prologue, the whole scene is compelled by music.

Finally, Felicity, realizing what has happened, comes downstairs and gets the meat cleaver and enters the maid's room. Amid thunder and lightning outside, we hear the maid and the seaman scream, then Felicity drags the maids body out of the bedroom and into the basement, banging her head on each step. Then the seaman staggers out of the bedroom, the meat cleaver in his back, and grabs another knife and enters the basement. We hear Felicity scream, more thunder and lightning, then the wedding march concludes the scene. But wait, three ghostly apparitions emerge through the basement door, one at a time.

Years later, a little family of Sid Ceasar, Vera Miles and Barry Gordon move in. Gordon is a cynical teen ager who takes the vacant bedroom off the kitchen because "it has it's own john." Then the basement door begins to open on its own.

The opening song is truly one of a kind, as another post points out. The phrase, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, comes from the Bible, the book of Matthew. Gordon is superb as the teen ager, Steve, who the ghosts torment. John McGiver (the assassinated Senator in 'Manchurian Candidate', Lord Beasley on a 'Gilligan's Island' episode) is amusing as always as Uncle George, who keeps getting his ship sunk by the ghosts.

The two flaws are from Jill Townsend, who plays the maid, Jenny, but also for some reason plays two of Jenny's descendants, who seem to know everything that happens. Yes, the town could know the place was haunted, but these sisters would finish Sid Ceasar's and Barry Gordon's sentences. To make matters worse, there was a child, Ricky Cordell, that my brother and I could never figure out why he was there. Was he the director's son? Was he the producer's girlfriend's son? Was he to appeal to a younger audience? When my brother and I recorded this show once, we edited out all the scenes with the sisters and the little boy. Other than that, the movie was a delight. Gordon gets the biggest laughs, none of the ghosts speak (interestingly still, Cass Daley had no lines before or after she "died" nor did the maid, Jenny, ever speak). At times, the music gets as bad as Petticoat Junction or the Monkees serial music. I saw another movie "Perils of Pauline" with Pat Boone and Terry-Thomas that had the same annoying music, but the opening song is still a winner.

Plus appearances by Mary Wickes, Jesse White and John Astin are nice too. Felicity wants a man of her own so then the three ghosts can live in peace. One funny moment is when Felicity is holding Jesse White at the bottom of the lake with an anchor on top of him, waiting for him to drown.

Nathaniel Benchley (son of humorist Robert Benchley) wrote The Visitors, a frightening novel about a ghostly haunting, which was purchased for filming by legendary Hollywood showman William Castle.

Castle, who had yet to attain respect as producer (but not director) of Roman Polanski's masterly Rosemary's Baby (1968), had recently completed a successful string of blatant imitations of Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), including Homicidal (1961) and Strait-Jacket (1964), and had stumbled with a pair of inept teen-thrillers, I Saw What You Did (1965) and Let's Kill Uncle (1966).

Evidently seeking to expand his audience while maintaining his position as king of schlock horror, Castle re-visioned Benchley's decidedly adult novel as a family comedy along the lines of his bland 13 Ghosts (1960). Unfortunately, Castle was hopeless as a comedy director, as his overly-broad Hammer remake of The Old Dark House (1963) had demonstrated. Humor had been an essential underlying element of Castle's most successful earlier films, The House on Haunted Hill (1958) and The Tingler (1959), but this had been supplied by star Vincent Price and the ironic wit of screenwriter Robb White rather than any knack on the part of the director. Castle persisted and The Spirit Is Willing descended into lazy slapstick, as did its black-comedy follow-up The Busy Body (1967), also starring Sid Caesar.

In and of itself, The Spirit Is Willing is a fun little movie which today carries an aura of tacky nostalgia, but the golden opportunity for a chilling ghostly thriller along the lines of Robert Wise's classic The Haunting (1963) was recklessly thrown away.

It behooves Dark Castle Entertainment, which has been remaking the Castle "classics", to consider a new, dramatic version of the Benchley novel. With the blockbuster success of films like The Sixth Sense, The Others and The Ring, the time is right for The Visitors to arrive.