My memories of many details of these movies has dimmed through the years. A search of this board shows that "Crowhaven Farm" was the title of a movie I was trying to identify based on some pretty clear memories of the movie. The thread where this was discussed was back in 2002, and when I read the description I wrote then, I'm amazed because I don't remember much of the movie now, as I did in 2002, though at that time I no longer knew the movie's title. (Is this normal, or do I need to be concerned about a failing memory?, i.e. loss of memory since 2002 about a movie not seen since about 1970?)

The other movie someone kindly identified for me in the 2002 thread was "Haunts of the Very Rich."

Thanks to Uncle Roger for identifying "The Screaming Woman." That sounded right, and when I looked up a description in imdb, that definitely was the Olivia deHavilland TV movie I remembered.

And the Joan Crawford TV appearance was definitely "The Sixth Sense," possibly identified previously on this forum, too. That must have been a short-lived TV show. I remember Joan Crawford being interviewed at the end of the segment and describing her own personal experience with ESP.

MB, thanks for the links to "Crowhaven Farm" and "The House That Would Not Die." Hope to re-watch the first one, and see the second for the first time!

I was also curious a while back and don't remember if I posted any inquiries here or not, about the TV show "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." I think I only watched a few of the episodes. I believe that was on Friday nights after one or two other shows that my sister and I watched, and there was a limit to how much TV we watched, and I don't think my sister was interested in "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir." I have had the pleasure of catching the last half hour or so of the movie of that title on Turner Classic Movies a couple of years ago, and got the DVD, though haven't set aside the time to watch it yet.

Anyway, when I watched a couple of episodes of "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" on Youtube, I was a little disappointed in how kiddish it was and I didn't pursue further. But the movie is another matter. Regarding the TV show, the name of actor Edward Mulhare wouldn't have meant anything to me back in the 1970s, but he had an interesting role as confidante of Deborah Kerr in "Eye of the Devil." A comparable character, that of a gentleman Platonic friend and confidante of the beleaguered heroine was played by Herbert Lom as Ingrid Thulin's friend in what may have then been called a "melodrama," "Return from the Ashes."

"Return from the Ashes," "Death Takes a Holiday," and "Two on a Guillotine" were the three movies I most wanted to track down from this period as an adult, and "Return from the Ashes" and "Two on a Guillotine" have been available as print-on-demand DVDs from amazon. "Death Takes a Holiday" hasn't been available except through someone who somehow taped it (in the '70s?) and transferred to disc.

Vincent Price loved having the opportunity to portray a number of characters from Shakespeare in this movie. I showed it for Halloween at my library a few years ago. I think the satire was lost on a few of the attendees ... I loved the poster or promotional artwork for the film which showed a languid young man in an Elizabethan setting, reminiscent of artwork I've seen for Shakespeare's sonnets.

I'm surprised that you guys haven't seen "Dragonwyck" before. As mentioned, it is shown on Turner Classic Movies every couple of years, which is where I've seen it, though I've always seemed to miss the beginning. It is a good movie and with broader appeal, I think, than many other "supernatural" movies. I don't actually remember it in much detail. It looks like it's only available on BlueRay. I hate it when they do that. I was going to say, Anya Seton, didn't she write "Black Beauty," but then I remembered that was Anna Sewell.

I saw a short youtube video of the snowglobe and I did not think the tiny model looked at all like Collinwood.

After some more thought, something very obvious occurred to me: the color. The color of the model in the snow globe is chalk white (walls) and the roof is a dark gray. The roof may be approximately right, but I'm not sure why they did the walls white. The color of the actual exterior of Collinwood is hard for me to pin down, but I would say a light gray. I'm not sure what I've read about the stone used. I might have read limestone. The limestone I'm familiar with from my state is a yellow color. I've seen a colorized post card of Seaview Terrace which uses that color. Perhaps the actual color is closer to a tan or sandy color, depending on the light.

Something else that occurs to me is that we only see certain sides of Collinwood on the show. The real house and any model of it presents angles that are unfamiliar to us from the show, so that gives one a different sense. And the atmosphere on the show, with the fog and twilight especially, and the opening voiceovers (Grayson Hall's are especially effective) create an atmosphere that's hard to replicate in other media (or real life!).

The model from Kordova Art (John Stewart) which can be Googled easily looks breathtakingly accurate, yet the spooky atmosphere of Collinwood is absent.

MB,

Unfortunately I don't have a digital camera to take pictures of the snow globe for you, and I've never been able to transfer photos from my phone to computer.

Is there any way you could describe these flaws in reference to the MPI photos? There are two photos by MPI that I have saved, one from the front and one from the back. I'll see if they can be attached to this post.

Would the question about the roof line be settled from a straight on aerial view? I'm not even sure of the term, but when I first looked at the Collinwood miniature in the snowglobe, I thought - it looks like the house was cobbled together by builders who couldn't line things up right!

Update: I tried attaching the two photos of the MPI snow globe, as well as the Google Maps aerial closeup, but even the smallest file is 362 KB, almost 4 times what's allowed to upload here.

I have been curious regarding MB's comment about a design flaw in the miniature of Collinwood found in the snow globe. Believing there is a flaw has somewhat dampened my enthusiasm, but I went ahead and ordered the snow globe for myself for Christmas as a gift from a family member. I have been pleased with the snow globe as I posted about in another thread, but there's still that nagging question of what's wrong with the Collinwood model.

I have spent several hours trying to discover what this might be and only now have returned to this thread to see that the flaw is visible, according to MB, in the picture of the snow globe on MPI's website. Well, you really can't see much detail in that picture, even when enlarged, so I am even more mystified, given my hours of studying photographs of Seaview Terrace that I've searched for online.

My search began with an aerial view of Seaview as found on Google maps. I had never really studied the layout of the house before, and though I've been there once, I hadn't really studied the house or its architecture. What I found from the aerial view is that the model in the snow globe is an accurate replica. I'm not saying that the model is going to hold to 100% accuracy especially if it were to be enlarged, but remember this is reducing an enormous mansion to a replica of only about 3 inches!

The first discrepancy I noted were the two trees - one in front of the tower at the back of the house, and one in the front near the circular drive. I also noticed that the driveway in the snowglobe had a slight variation, leaving off the actual entrance and instead accentuating what may actually be a sidewalk. Those things I could forgive for aesthetic reasons is there was some reason to change them. As far as the trees, I recall when I was there how bald that back yard was and thinking it could use some trees and shrubbery - it looked like Seaview could use a makeover from a landscaper. Then I found online in some older photographs that there have been trees near the tower in the past, so maybe the designer of the model was using older photographs. And perhaps even the route of the drive had changed over the decades. Another thing I noticed was that the porte-cochere on the miniature is filled in, as if it were a small add-on to the house. Again, I reasoned that given the vastly reduced nature of the miniature, it was easier to produce a solid extension of the building than an open porte-cochere. I mean, for $30 one can't expect a masterpiece of museum quality. I noticed that the tower in the back was somewhat overpowering, bigger than life. I compared views of the snowglobe at different angles with photographs I found online and found that, in real life, one wouldn't even see the top of the tower (which I identified as southwest) when looking from the opposite side of the house (in my estimation, the northeast). So the tower is larger than scale. A bit of a disappointment, but I would reason that the reason for them doing this is that the model would be so low and flat looking within the snowglobe - it already is, in keeping the square-footage area in proportion to the height of the building (as it appears to be, but I can't really say for sure).

Not every detail is depicted in the model and some are missing, but I have been very impressed overall. When I thought that various recessed areas were not evident, I found upon closer examination that those areas are actually recessed in the model, too. When I thought that the unfamiliar north end of the building didn't seem right, I found that it even had the right number of windows as seen in photographs. When I thought that the single-story area in the front courtyard to the left of the entrance couldn't be right (this is where I imagine that the study would have to be, where Grandma Collins lay in her coffin, and where Barnabas confronted Nathan Forbes, is a single-story area of the actual house (I don't remember seeing this at all when I was actually at Seaview Terrace).

I next found photographs of a 3' by 4' scale model of Collinwood produced in great detail by Korova Art and compared especially some of less familiar sides  and views of the building's exterior, especially that northeast corner, which for some reason I had found rather unimpressive in real life. This may be the area I read about where an earlier mansion had actually stood, vestiges of which were incorporated in this north wing of the house - something else I had never known about. And the snow globe model depicts all of these areas accurately with one obvious omission, which is the lack of a fireplace on that end of the building in the miniature.

So, even upon close inspection, I have been unable to identify the glaring design flaw when should have perhaps ruined my enjoyment of the snow globe. Perhaps it is something to do with the architecture of the tower, as that is probably the most prominent aspect of the house that is visible in the MPI photograph. Besides it being too big, perhaps it is not accurate in terms of the French Romanesque style - I haven't studied that yet and will leave it to those better versed in architectural design, which I believe MB is!
To complete my observations of the globe part of the snow globe, what I thought was green snow is actually the usual white fluff one finds in snow globes. There isn't a lot of it and it seems to fall into some sort of crevice about the edges of the miniature yard. But when you shake the snow globe, in addition to the snow there is also something like glitter. These may be tiny plastic pieces that seem to actually be a pinkish color but appear to reflect green from the bright green grass of the yard. That does give a somewhat eerie quality, rather interesting in that the green tinge apparently is a reflection from the golf-course green grass around Collinwood (which is a bit too bright and green for my taste).

-Phillippe

I was searching for something else and came upon information about the documentary in a Shadowgram update, here: http://dsboards.com/SMF/index.php?topic=82150.msg347047#msg347047, thanks. This sounds like a promising, quality production - I will watch for the DVD.