Well I've had to scrap the countdown again.....

Essentially the 1988 movie "Lady in White" is a semi biography mixed in with a ghost story and murder mystery. It follows an 11-year old schoolboy Frankie Scarlatti, the youngest of two sons to a widowed father who shares his home with his own Italian parents and his adopted brother, in Willowpoint Falls, a tightly knit smalltown community in the 1960's.

The film covers nearly a year of Frankie's life, starting on Halloween, where he falls victim to a malicious prank by his schoolmates who trick him into searching the school cloakroom and then lock him in for the night. On that night he witnesses the spectre of a young girl robotically reliving the final moments of her life before she was savagely murdered in the cloakroom without motive by her unseen companion.

As the year goes by, Frankie comes to befriend the ghost girl Melissa as she visits him whenever she can. She is eager to find a friend and weeps that she cannot find her mother and pleads with Frankie to help her. He becomes involved in determining the mystery of her murder and a series of other unsolved child murders, and becomes dangerously deep in, attracting the attention of the killer themself.

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The Lady in White is an incredibly schizophrenic film. On the one hand it's a typical saccarine children's film, on the other it's a dark, gothic supernatural thriller with some truly horrific moments. The opening fifteen or twenty minutes don't really give much of a clue that this is going to be a film with sinister overtones. We see Frankie going to school on his bicycle and the usual chirpy, twee violin orchestra comes in, and we see the clockwork routine of the town as he passes by suburban houses and shops and the usual slapstick ensues. For that period it seems like the thrilling and chilling highlight of the film is going to be Frankie's awkwardly delivered but still overegged monster story he reads out in Show and Tell, which is met with exaggerated awe and suspense by the children and their teacher. Mind you it did somewhat resemble the plot of Cloverfield, which was a darn scary film.

But in its own way the scenes in the classroom characterises Frankie well as a 'gifted', forward planning child with a brilliant mind and talent for reading between the lines that is ahead of his years. But he is still only a child, and the night he is locked in the cloakroom and confronted with the ghost of Melissa reliving her final moments marks the end of innocence for him, and indeed for the suburb. Of course Frankie is no stranger to death, as we witness a flashback to the funeral of his dead mother. It's a cliche convention, to account for Frankie's unique sensitivity and mature perspective, and yet the flashback scene stays on the right side of the cliche, and effectively tugs at the viewer's mortal coil and anxieties about regretting words unsaid to the dearly departed. It also creates a common link between him and the ghost of Melissa.

It was of course with a certain irony that Lukas Haas was cast in the role of Franke, fresh from playing a similar murder witness in the classic 1985 thriller, Witness. Except of course here he's a witness with a twist, allowing him to form a friendship with the actual murder victim. But in any case Lukas Haas was an ideal choice and performs the lead part wonderfully, well apart from the aforementioned scene where he's reading his Cloverfield story and clearly struggling with the more literate words, belying the pretense that he wrote the story himself.

There's something darkly tender about the scene where Melissa relives her murder- tender like a sensitive wound. The juxtaposition between her child-like carefree giggly joy de vie and the moment of terror is wonderful. An almost beautiful, passionate explosion of fear, screams and struggle. A last primal fight to live. And then a still quiet, Melissa lying lifeless, delicate and limp like a discarded rag doll. A scene like that really stays with you.

If the film is a master of anything, it is the power to shock with an emotional punch. However what lets the shock moments down a bit is the reliance on unnecessary exaggerated reaction shots and ad libs from Frankie. It has the effect of making me as a viewer, feel like I'm being told how to react. I had a similar problem with Neverending Story actually. I'm not saying that the scenes of violence should have been directed in the kind of leering way that made David Cronenberg's Shivers unpleasant to watch. But a muted horror approach would have been more effective. As it is the bite of those scenes is neutered, the effect dilluted. Well, incidentally speaking anyway, whilst being viewed the effect is dilluted, but still the scenes retain no less staying power.

And this is the two stools the film falls between- children's film and a dark, adult film. As such the film style varies between naturalism and the childlike wonder and excitement which leads to a twee, overblown, overdramatic style with a tendency for slapstick and other such exaggeration. As the film goes on and comes to the climax it leans rather more on the naturalist style and gothic atmosphere. I suppose what really marries the two and makes both work for me is the sheer sincerity and sweetness of its childhood 60's nostalgia. There's a real fondness for the old days of smalltown life and chequered shirts, of growing up with the extended family living under one roof. Of the antics of the eccentric grandparents. Sharing a bed with the older brother and being able to blackmail him on pain of telling father about his masturbation habits. The weekend hunting trips with their favourite uncle.

There are points where the film becomes so ensconsed in the seasonal rituals of the smalltown that the murder mystery becomes almost forgotten. There are parts of the film where the feel is so retro it almost seems like it was made in the 60's. The narrated scene where Frankie has a near death experience and witnesses the afterlife, even by its old film stock looks reminiscent of the surreal sequences of 60's films like Vertigo and The Time Machine. You can even choose to see Frankie's growing relationship with Melissa's ghost asd reminiscence on the magic of experiencing his first girlfriend. Particularly since the confident, teasing Melissa seems a far better, more precocious catch than the shy girls with braids that Frankie goes to school with. Melissa's appearance is marked by some truly enchanting music, and she almost becomes just another visiting guest at Christmas gatherings.

But mainly this is a film about the horrors of the real world seen from the eyes of innocence. So it's a very moral story, featuring a somewhat contrived but otherwise solid and streamlined narrative which emphasises the chains of events and consequences. It's a film about what grief and loss does to people, and it's also about the things that refuse to stay buried. When Frankie has been attacked by the same masked murderer who killed Jessica and various other children, it reopens many old wounds. Family and friends visit Frankie and the men talk on the porch. It's odd and touching to see male bonding between the most masculine of men, the most fatherly of fathers and yet pouring their hearts and their fears out to one another so openly.

In terms of a streamlining narrative, it's wonderful how the murder of Melissa provides all this impetus. They revisit their past griefs, Frankie's father remembers losing his wife, others remember losing their parents, and in concert with the film's sense of the inner child they all think back to their own childhoods, trying to remember when the world suddenly stopped being safe. Not only that but quite cleverly we get the hints of how one such personal tragedy might have left one of these men as damaged goods with unresolved demons, and traumatised and messed up enough to do something so horrific. And so we see the killer in an emotionally naked light and it's a pitiful sight, and the moment where he is finally exposed is even more pitiful and raw.

And really that's what morality tales are about at their best. They're not just about good and evil, but about understanding the reasons why, about what drives a man to commit evil acts. They're about challenging our own moral sense, making us question our judgement or what we're capable of, and this film certainly does that. One of the major sub-plots of the film is the one concerning how the school janitor is falsely incriminated and arrested for the murders. The evidence against him is purely circumstantial, as he happens to work at the scene of the murders. However the community of Willowpoint Falls quickly mobilises into a bloodthirsty lynch mob, determined to have him hung from the highest tree before he's even been pronounced guilty.

So the film says that there are predators out there, hiding amongst us, and possibly closer to home than we'd like to acknowledge, and that we should be vigilant. However it is also saying that usually a community's knee jerk reaction to murder is wrongheaded, stupid and dangerous. And more importantly they're only interested in going for the easiest target. The janitor makes a convenient scapegoat because he's a black man in the 1960's, and so whether guilty or innocent he is viewed as inferior and his life is seen to matter less. The community also have few qualms about harrasing his wife and family too for being 'guilty by association'.

This was of course released at a time when films like The Colur Purple and Mississippi Burning were taking an explicit look at America's ugly racist recent past. In some ways the film plays it a bit safe. The fact that Frankie's father is one of the few to protest that the janitor is innocent and not join in with the bigoted condemnations, is almost as contrived and safe as if the prossecution lawyer turned out to be the real killer. But apart from that we really see how the bloodlust of a lynch mob can't be reasoned with and can't just be turned off, which is frightening. Even when the janitor is finally pronounced not guilty and released, the public have long made up their mind his guilt and their fate and they won't be stopped now.

Even though Frankie is absent here, we are still somehow seeing this through a child's perspective. We are seeing just how shocking this turn of events are. A veiled gunshot under the guise of an apology and an acknowledgement of his innocence. That scene is so unexpected and has real sting, as we see an innocent life wasted to confusion and madness. And yet it's hard not to sympathise with the mother of one of the victims who fired the fatal shot. We'd seen her over the course of the film losing her faith in a God that let her son die, and losing her sanity. Even at her most vicious she still seems so fragile, and can be pitied even at her most unreasoning as she is driven to take the only course of action that makes any sense to her anymore.

But of course whilst that's a sympathetic example, generally speaking lynch mobs are mostly composed of the absolute lumpen proletariat pondscum of society, who's interest isn't in justice. They simply want someone to bully and crucify, someone to vent their vindictive mean spirits onto so that they can feel morally superior, and they usually go after the easiest scapegoats, the minorities, loners and misfits who are seen as less than human and are easy to demonise and persecute. They're usually beyond reasoning, completely incapable of giving anyone the benefit of the doubt or seeing things from anyone else's point of view and therefore shouldn't ever be listened to. Nine times out of then, lynch mobs will become the very terror and menace to society that they were supposed to eradicate. And given that this film was released in the decade of Rambo and Dirty Harry, that really needed to be said.

The climax, although heavily marred by some very dated blue screen effects, is a great summation of what the film's been aiming for. The final word on the theme of grief destroying people, repressed horrors exploding to the surface, and the point where our helpless witness to past horrors he can't change, finally walks in the victim's footsteps and finally puts up a fight against evil. And it may seem twee but the final moments when Frankie's father arrives to the rescue is a great moral moment, where we see how family offers something unique and unconditional, and is willing to show the kind of understanding and forgiveness that no lynch mob can ever appreciate. And it proves that as much of a bitter cynic I am, I'm still not averse to a Disneyfied happy ending that somehow moves me and makes me all gushy and teary eyed now and again.

I've compared this film with The Neverending Story in terms of strengths and weaknesses. Like The Neverending Story, it's the memories of when I first watched it that make me still fond of it. That make me remember a time when the uncertain tone didn't bother me and I found it truly enchanting and shocking in a way few other viewing experiences could match. I suppose like all flawed films but with a good, charming story at their heart, it compells me to dig deeper to its potential and as such treat it with more affection. But I suppose the main strength of the film is that what makes it inconsistent perhaps defines the story it's telling. It's about something dark and horrific hidden under a idyllic suburban veneer and childhood nostalgia, and it's about the things that refuse to stay buried.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older