The Amazing Mr Blunden – 1972 | 120mins | Drama | Colour

Plot Synopsis

This creepy tale is adapted from Antonia Barber’s book, The Ghosts. There’s nostalgia, menace and charm in about equal measures.

A widowed mother Mrs Allen (Dorothy Alison), and her two young children Jamie and Lucy, take up the mysterious offer from genial lawyer Mr. Blunden (Laurence Naismith) to become housekeepers at a derelict country mansion called Langley Park that is rumoured to be haunted. Young Jamie and Lucy meet the mansion’s resident ghosts one afternoon in the gardens; the spiritual orphans Sara and George were once the mansion’s heirs. They recount the tale of tyrannical Mrs. Wickens (Diana Dors), the mother-in-law of Bertie (James Villiers) and his wife Bella (Madeleine Smith), who plotted the children’s death in order to claim their inheritance. Jamie and Lucy are given instructions on how to concoct a magic potion that will transport them back to 1818 so that they may help right a 100-year-old wrong. When researching into the death of Sara and George in the local churchyard they once again meet Mr. Blunden, he explains how he was the guardian of Sara and George but failed to act on their pleas of impending danger, and it is his ghost that instigated the Allen family taking up residence at the mansion. Jamie and Lucy consume the magic potion and are sent back in time to the night of the children’s death so they might assist Mr. Blunden in rewriting history.