Papa Was a Bills Fan

Lady in White (1988)
directed by Frank LaLoggia
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

There is a modest but spooky ghost story here, filled with unsettling imagery like a woman at the window on a moonlit night and the ghost of a girl carried unconscious by an invisible figure to a cliff. The mask that the boy wears, a homemade Lugosi, is just the sort of mask that every kid should be lucky enough to have on Halloween. The movie begins on Halloween, which, as Steve says, is rare.

But Lady in White is also about growing up as a younger brother in an Italian-American household. It is about Catholic guilt and doubt in "God's plan." And, out of nowhere, it is a heavy-handed lesson in racial prejudice, although LaLoggia is quick to assert that his own the protagonist's father stands tall for equality.

I'll take the ghosts but he can keep the rest. The family is warm, if a bit dull, and part of me wondered if this were not some odd reclamation of an absent mother in LaLoggia's childhood. Who is Frankie Scarlatti, the plucky but sensitive kid, if not a stand-in for his Rochester-born creator? Who is it that all these children and all these ghosts want if not a mom?