Things change once Sam picks up on foul play and enlists the help of Oda Mae Brown (Whoopi Goldberg), a storefront psychic who’s shocked to discover she can actually hear a spirit after years of bilking widows out of money. But Sam passes on his ticket to heaven for the time being and lingers in New York like one of the angels in Wings of Desire, a sympathetic observer to the living. Shortly after Sam notices multimillion-dollar discrepancies in various accounts that Carl had accessed, he winds up dead in what seems like a common street mugging gone wrong. In the early going, Goldwyn’s Carl plays third wheel to Sam Wheat (Swayze), his best friend and fellow Wall Street banker, and Sam’s girlfriend Molly (Moore), an artist who’s deep into remodeling their new apartment. Eagle-eyed viewers will know whodunnit just by picking up on the words “Tony Goldwyn” in the opening credits, and slower ones won’t be far behind. The thriller elements of Ghost are the most dominant, and by far the least interesting. God has a plan for all of us, Rubin implies, and the good guys and the bad guys are going to get sorted out just as plainly as his screenplay defines them. And it’s a simple and only vaguely religious divining of the righteous and the damned. It’s a white-knuckle thriller about unmasking a deadly conspiracy. It’s a comedy about a put-upon spiritual adviser. The trick of Ghost is that it has something for everybody: it’s a love story that brushes with the transcendent. The driving creative force behind Ghost was writer Bruce Joel Rubin, who would win the Oscar for best original screenplay and spend the next few years toggling between domestic thrillers such as Deceived and Sleeping with the Enemy (uncredited), sentimental dramas about death like My Life, and Jacob’s Ladder, which is a mishmash of the two with a horror bent. It’s bathed in a heavenly light, even before it happens literally. Swayze had done it before with Dirty Dancing, the slow-burn smash that put him on the map, but Ghost was a more full-service phenomenon, a romance that doubled as an affirmation of faith. Yet that still doesn’t account for how thoroughly it defied any formula for box-office success and how surprised industry-watchers were about how quickly it seized the cultural imagination. Thirty years later, Ghost is remembered as a unicorn of sorts, exactly the type of film that Hollywood has no interest in making any more: an original, modestly budgeted love story with spiritual underpinnings. Director Jerry Zucker, better known at the time as one-third of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spoof squad behind Airplane!, was aware enough that he was pushing the edge of parody in fact, only a year later, “the brother of the director of Ghost”, David Zucker, referenced the scene in The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear.Īnd yet Ghost is nothing if not absolutely earnest and resolutely unhip, to the point where the “A Jerry Zucker Film” credit still merits a double take. The money scene of a shirtless Swayze sidling up to Demi Moore at the pottery wheel, shaping wet clay from vase to phallus as the Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody plays in the background, was perhaps something only he could pull off. The notion of a star like Swayze paying attention to women and serving their fantasies is more radical than it seemed, especially at the time of his ascendence, but it does a lot to account for the success of Ghost, which barreled through mostly dismissive reviews to become the biggest hit of 1990.
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