The Best Last Ever Movie Appearances - Fred Astaire - Douglas Fairbanks Junior – Ghost Story

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Sometimes a movie proves to be the last chance for more than one great actor to bow out, and rarely more so than Ghost Story (1981), an under-rated gentle Gothic horror tale based on a Peter Straub novel, featuring not only Astaire & Fairbanks but also Melvyn Douglas and John Houseman. The quartet of old timers are haunted in more ways than one; age draws natural death closer, their memories of a tragedy in their youth (gradually revealed in flashbacks with younger actors) plays on their minds, and a demonic apparition is materializing and killing them off, one by one. The flashbacks reveal that the four men all loved one promiscuous woman, who is seemingly accidentally killed by one of them in a fight. Realizing that going to the police could ruin their futures, the four younger men conspire to dump her in a nearby lake, only to see too late as the car containing her body sinks, that she was still alive. The vengeful hauntings, and the girl reincarnating as Alma, (Alice Krige playing the daughter of Fairbanks’s character), brings the past back to torment the men, and presents the danger of history repeating itself for their sons. A beautifully played melodrama, with a very downbeat melancholy atmosphere. Fairbanks’s character dies early on in the movie, with his death ambiguous enough to look like suicide over grief about the son who was also killed by the ghost. Astaire’s character survives, finally revealing the crime to the police so the car and badly decomposed body are recovered, which clears his troubled conscience and breaks the murderous spell, but leads to his arrest. The cast play like character actors rather than movie legends getting together for a final big screen jamboree. They give the film the glory and if anything, they under-play their roles. Astaire in particular reminds us what a fine actor he could be in non-dancing roles. Let’s be glad Astaire didn’t leave us after The Amazing Dobermans (1976), one of a chain of movies about dogs trained to help in bank heists. Fairbanks similarly forgot the advice of W C Fields about working with children or animals but fortunately Ghost Story came long after Mr. Drake’s Duck about the eponymous duck laying radioactive eggs. It’s a one joke Cold War farce from 1951. Fairbanks did this and a few other no-brainers in the early 1950’s before his short-lived 1980’s comeback. Arthur Chappell