O Fantasma da Mansão

So why isn't it the House on Marsh Road instead of in? Don't know.

Patricia Dainton and Tony Wright are Jean and David Linton always down to their last British pound thanks to his drinking and not working. Suddenly Jean inherits a house from an aunt, along with 1000 pounds. Back in 1960, that was the equivalent of 21,000 pounds today.

You'd think Tony would be happy. He now has the solitude he needs to write the great British novel. However, all he does is complain. When he learns at the local pub that a real estate investor would buy the place for 6000 pounds, he wants to sell.

Jean won't hear of it. She loves the place, despite the alleged presence of Patrick, a poltergeist so-named by the maid (Anna Sharp-Bolster) who comes in to work. Patrick, she says, is there to protect the relatives of the previous owners.

Tony writes book reviews and does some work on his novel, but he can't type. He hires a sexy local woman, Valerie (Sandra Dorne) who is going through a divorce. She's not interested in him when she finds out the house is Jean's. Well, just supposing the house suddenly became his?

Good, atmospheric, short black and white film, with excellent performances and a great ending! Very entertaining.

It seems unusual for a story with a poltergeist character to be set in the modern era (1960) but the story is convincing and the narrative is helped by the effective and restrained performances of the main characters. The music seems strangely reminiscent of Bernard Hermann's Vertigo score in places; in others of that used in the One Step Beyond TV series; surely a coincidence since the latter was produced at around the same time as this film.

Patricia Dainton is married to Tony Wright, a writer.... when he isn't drinking up all the cash. She inherits a house from her late aunt, and loves it; he wants to be in London, especially when a local real estate man offers him an unlikely sum of money for it. She won't sell. She loves the memories, she loves owning something real, she's even fond of the house's resident poltergeist, at which Wright scoffs.He takes up with Sandra Dorne, and eventually the comes to him that if his wife is dead, he can sell the house and take his lover to London. So he tries a couple of ways to kill her.

Mostly it's a thriller,with Miss Dainton being the lovely, totally unobjectionable sort of blonde which, in my experience, can drive a man mad. Wright is a lazy cad, and Miss Dorne is.... well, she's easy. It's efficiently written and directed; Walter Harvey's shadowy cinematography is a big plus.

Supernatural thriller. A woman inherits an old country house from her late aunt, and moves in with her wastrel husband. He soon begins an affair with a local woman, and before long he's plotting to murder his wife. But the resident ghost has other ideas...

Tony Wright and Patricia Dainton are good as the husband and wife, whilst Sandra Dorne is perfectly cast as the local trash he takes up with (she seemed to specialise in these sorts of roles). Nice to see popular character actor Sam Kydd as the local property developer interested in buying the house. Pretty enjoyable. 6/10.

This nicely scary little ghost story is pretty straight-forward = in plot. A husband with a sexy mistress is trying to murder his wife, and a protect= ive (family-owned) poltergeist blocks him at every attempt. But the brief summary fails to convey some fine performances and lovely atmospherics t= hat rise above what is basically a "B" - level thriller. The women take act= ing honors -- Sandra Dorne is probably at her most-enticing ripeness as the buxom blonde divorcée who lures David Linton to his doom, and she pani= cs beautifully when trapped with her lover in the doomed house; Patricia Dainton is convincing, too, as the long-suffering wife of the promiscuou= s David. Third, for comic relief, Anita Sharp-Bolster is hilarious as the Irish housekeeper, who complains about "Patrick," whom she's named after her husband "because she never sees him" either! The black and white photography is moody and penetrating, as is the haunting music of John Veale (though it gets too loud and overrides the dialogue once or twice.= ) A hard-to-find video is available from several U.S. sources, both as "Invisible Creature" and "The House in Marsh Road."