NEED TO KNOW
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Ghost celebrates its 35th anniversary on July 13
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The romance thriller made $505.7 million at the box office and inspired a Broadway musical
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However, back in 1990, PEOPLE’s film critic called it “dopily written”
Ghost premiered on July 13, 1990, centering on a young woman in trouble as the ghost of her murdered lover tries to protect her with the help of a spiritual medium.
The movie opens up with lovebirds Sam Wheat (Patrick Swayze) and Molly Jensen (Demi Moore). However, it takes a turn when Wheat is murdered by business partner Carl Brunner (Tony Goldwyn), leaving him to return as a ghost but unable to communicate with Jensen. The late banker then seeks help from psychic Old Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg) to shield Jensen from Brunner’s nefarious plans.
At the time, PEOPLE’s critic noted that the film “isn’t another movie about friendly spirits hanging out” and “takes the ghost business with boneheaded seriousness.”
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Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Swayze on the set of ‘Ghost’
“Swayze is killed in a mugging and realizes he’s dead to the world (though visible to the audience), he starts researching ghost behavior,” the review read in part. “He wants to help Moore, his girlfriend, catch his killer.”
“So he finds a veteran ghost, Vincent Schiavelli, who can physically influence the living. Swayze goes into training, and Schiavelli tells him, ‘You’ve gotta take all your emotion — all your anger, love, hate — push it way down into the pit of your stomach and let it explode,'” the review continued. “In its intensity and mumbo jumbo, the scene resembles Yoda guru-ing Luke — you expect Schiavelli to tell Swayze, ‘Let the ectoplasm be with you.’ “
PEOPLE joked in its Ghost review that Moore may have set “an all-time record for most scenes of tears welling up in eyes” in the “dopily written” film, which also had “fundamentalist Christian overtones.”
“The zero-perspective direction is by Jerry Zucker, who has been involved with on-purpose funny movies — such as Airplane! — but none that more richly deserves guffaws than this one,” the review concluded. “If making bad movies qualifies as a deadly sin, [Bruce Joel] Rubin and Zucker had better start pushing all their emotion into the pit of their stomachs right now so they have a fighting chance when those little devils in the black outfits come after them.”
Peter Sorel/Paramount/Kobal/Shutterstock Image from 1990’s ‘Ghost’
Despite this review from PEOPLE, the film raked in a whopping $505.7 million worldwide, surpassing another 1990 hit, Home Alone, which made $476.6 million at the box office. Ghost was nominated for five awards and won three at the 1991 Oscars. Goldberg walked away with the hardware for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Speaking to PEOPLE after the movie came out, Swayze explained that the film was much more than just a love story to him. He revealed that seeing the plaster dummy representing his character’s body took him back to his father’s funeral, when he “almost passed out” after touching his dad in his coffin.
“I had pushed that memory out of my life until that moment on location when it all came back, big time,” he said. “There were a few scenes where something happened to me that was very scary.”
As difficult as it was to manage those emotions, it helped him tap into his character, who, like his father, died before his time.
In the same interview, Swayze said he felt the message of the film “was about living your life for the moment, because that’s all you’ve got … If you don’t communicate with the people you love, you set yourself up for incredible pain if you lose them.”
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Speaking at a 2013 American Film Institute event honoring the film, Moore said she loved the script but wasn’t sure audiences would respond to it.
“It’s a love story, and it’s a guy – a dead guy – trying to save his wife, and there is a comedy part, but really, really it’s a love story, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is really a recipe for disaster … It’s either going to be something really special, really amazing, or really an absolute bust,'” she recalled.
She shared a similar sentiment over a decade later while chatting with Interview Magazine, acknowledging that Ghost got “horrible reviews.”
Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty
Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze in ‘Ghost’
“I remember seeing the movie and thinking it was great, and then the first reviews were awful,” the actress said in the 2024 interview.
“I was so out of my body, because all of a sudden, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can trust myself because I thought it was good?’ At that moment, I decided to not read reviews, because you have to give equal value to the good and the bad,” she added.
Ghost is available to watch for free on Kanopy and Hoopla, and for rent on Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV.
Read the original article on People
