To the Lighthouse

Neither the Sea nor the Sand (1972) is sort of a ghost or zombie story, but it's more like one of those overwrought 70s tragic romances. At least, I think it is - I don't watch many.

Susan Hampshire is visiting a lighthouse on the Isle of Jersey. Frank Finlay is there by chance and they fall in together, crossing the causeway to the shore before the tide cuts them off. She is pretty, he is brooding. He comes from an old Jersey family, she has a husband back in England that she no longer loves. He invites her back to the manor house, where she meets his disapproving, stuck-up brother. They make love.

When it comes time for her to leave, she begs him to let her go, but he just looks at her with his brooding eyes. In the end, she gets off the ferry and stays with him.

Brother is a bit of a bring-down, so they go to stay at a cottage in Scotland, again beside the sea. He makes her quite cross by playing in the roaring surf - since we read a summary of the movie, we know he isn't going to survive, so we are worried too. But he survives and laughs it off. Then, on another day, he just drops dead on the beach. When a doctor arrives, he pronounces it a subarachnoid hemorrhage. 

Hampshire is devastated, and begs him to return to her, never to leave her, to come back. She spends the night with the body in the shed. And the next morning, he's up and walking around. He's silent, and he seems to spend all his time looking at Hampshire, but he's walking under his own power.

And so, Hampshire tries to find happiness living with a dead guy. But he doesn't really fit into her world - no pulse and all that. And when he kisses her, she's pretty turned off. So she realizes the next step. She pleads with him to leave her, to let her live. He heads to the causeway to the lighthouse - but it isn't low tide. And she has no choice but to follow him and drowns.

So, not really horror, but horror as a metaphor for all-consuming passion. Hampshire is makes a good star - she's old enough to be a neglected wife, pretty enough to inspire an affair. Frank Finlay does brooding fairly well. He gave me a kind of Alan Bates/Oliver Reed kind of feel. Which is funny because he played Porthos to Reed's Athos in Lester's Three Musketeers. 

But frankly, it needed more horror.