See these films: The Ghost and Mrs. Muir + Dragonwyck @ the HFA

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947)

Ghosts were once less disagreeable on the big screen than they are today. Compare the specter in, say, Paranormal Activity, with the spook in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947; 7 pm). He's the sexy, pipe-smoking, bearded sea captain (Rex Harrison), who proves erotically titillating to the widow (Gene Tierney), when she moves into the quaint cottage he haunts. This bittersweet charmer is screening at the Harvard Film Archive with Mankiewicz's debut feature, the rarely screened Dragonwyck (1946; 9:15 pm), which also stars Tierney, in this case as a farm girl wooed by a land baron played by Vincent Price, who would probably have made a creepier ghost than Rex Harrison. It screens on Friday, August 19 in the Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge | $9; $7 students, seniors | 617.495.4700 or hcl.harvard.edu/hfa.