The Stately Ghosts of England (1965)

Ah, the Sixties, when NBC News somehow deigned to hire – apparently already paranormally inclined – Frank “future The Entity guy” De Felitta to adapt a non-fiction – of a kind - book by Diana Norman about some haunted manors in England.

Because as guy from the Bronx doesn’t exactly scream “stately manor house”, the ensuing documentary is actually carried by Margaret “Miss Marple” Rutherford, her apparently mute husband Stringer Davis, and “clairvoyant” (not space cadet!) Tom Corbett.

So Rutherford and her hangers-on in turn visit three stately manors, all of which clearly can only be filmed in Dutch angles, let some posh twat tell the local ghost story in the tone of often told, well-rehearsed stories, and then begin wandering about the place while an impressive orchestral score swoons. Corbett inevitably sees ghosts (and corrects the number of ghosts from the stories upwards), Rutherford overacts every of the very many reaction shots asked of her while quoting Shakespeare or Byron. All the while Stringer Davis looks on, confused why he’s even there.

In other words, it’s pretty fantastic entertainment for the lover of ghost stories or of the less YouTube sort of posh English ghost hunting – Dame Rutherford certainly won’t measure any magnetic fields or shout at any given spirit person – and the paranormal as cosy entertainment.

For me, as someone who grew up on our German Edgar Wallace adaptations as a focal point of what England is supposed to look and feel like – that is, not at all like the real place – the film provides the additional kick of doing something comparable through the eyes of American De Felitta, with the added frisson of De Felitta actually having some proper British upper class people to act out his fantasies about their country for him.