The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (Charles K. Feldman Productions, Universal, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I bypassed the earlier showing of Kidnapped in Paradise at 8 p.m. because I wanted to watch a film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” at 9 that I was curious about but had never seen: the rather clunkily titled The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (apparently the title of the play it was based on was simply Uncle Harry, and that’s the title producer Joan Harrison wanted to attach to the film as well), made in 1945 as a co-production of Charles K. Feldman’s company and Universal. Joan Harrison had been hired in the early 1930’s in Britain by Alfred Hitchcock as a secretary, but she soon impressed Hitchcock with her overall knowledge of film and eventually worked her way up to be his assistant as well as to contribute to a number of his scripts. Universal offered her a producer’s contract in 1944 and she scored with Phantom Lady, a full-fledged noir directed by Robert Siodmak (yet another of the German expatriates who did so much to transport what had been the “German style” of filmmaking in the Weimar Republic years to the U.S. to create film noir, along with Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder. Edgar G. Ulmer and others) from a novel by major noir writer Cornell Woolrich. Though originally just a programmer, Phantom Lady was a big hit and Universal gave Joan Harrison carte blanche to pick her next project. What she picked was a play called Uncle Harry by Thomas Job, a Welsh-born British writer, which had premiered on Broadway in 1942 and been a smash hit; the posters for the movie even advertised that it was “Based on the Play that Shocked Broadway!”

Harrison and her writers, Keith Winter and Stephen Longstreet, moved the action from Britain to the decidedly fictitious mill town of Corinth, New Hampshire, and what they came up with based on Job’s play was a movie that often seems like a sequel to Orson Welles’ 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons. The Quincys were once the first family of Corinth until, like the Ambersons, they were displaced by an entrepreneurial capitalist – in this story his name is Warren instead of Morgan and he built a textile mill instead of an automobile factory, and it took the Great Depression to strip the Quincys of their fortune, though unlike the Ambersons they at least got to keep the great house they’d been living in (that same old-dark-house set Universal used again and again in their horror films). The main conflict is between the three Quincy adult children: older sister Hester (Moyna McGill), middle brother Harry (George Sanders, top-billed) and younger sister Lettie (Geraldine Fitzgerald in an acid-etched performance that steals the film – and stealing a film from George Sanders is not easy to do!). “ˆNoir Alley’ host Eddie Muller said the film seems to be uncertain in time – the “official” setting is 1935 but the surroundings (particularly the furnishings of That House) and the culture seem to be about two or three decades earlier – but for me the rather odd cultural displacements seem to sum up the central point of the story.

Uncle Harry (like George Amberson Minafer) has had to take a job he considers beneath him, designing fabric patterns for the Warren mill (and having to do the same patterns over and over again because the Warren management resists change), and his only recreations are amateur astronomy (he’s built his own reflecting telescope in his attic) and playing piano for some of his friends who have an amateur barber-shop quartet. (We get a bit of Sanders’ own quite nice bass-baritone voice, which we’d hear again in the 1953 musical Call Me Madam.) Otherwise he’s trapped in that big overstuffed Victorian house with Hester, Lettie and their maid Nona (Sara Allgood, veteran of the Abbey Players in Dublin, Ireland who made an explosive film debut as the mother in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1930 film of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock and occasionally did get other roles of some dramatic definition, notably as the bloodthirsty dyke who eagerly promotes the lynching in The Ox-Bow Incident, but mostly was the go-to person for Irish maids the way Hattie McDaniel was for Black ones) holding him down, narrowing his expectations and neurotically keeping him from any contact with the modern world.

Contact with the modern world comes galloping in in the person of Deborah Brown (Ella Raines, a protégée of producer Harrison and previously the star of Phantom Lady), a representative of the Warren company’s New York office who’s come to Corinth to modernize the products and the operations. John Warren (Craig Reynolds), son and heir to the Warren fortune and the person who had the idea of bringing Deborah in in the first place, courts her and offers her a combination honeymoon and working trip if she’ll marry him, but Deborah has fallen for Uncle Harry since he invited her to his attic observatory to show her the rings of Saturn through his telescope. Needless to say, their courtship has been witnessed at every turn by Hester and Lettie, and though Hester is cool with Harry finding himself at least a sort-of girlfriend, Lettie fights against the relationship with a tenacity verging on the incestuous. (The Production Code Administration had a lot of problems with Uncle Harry, but surprisingly they missed all the hints of Lettie’s incestuous crush on Harry, which seem almost neon-bright obvious today!)

Not only is Uncle Harry definitely not a film noir (despite the carry-over of director Robert Siodmak and actress Ella Raines from Phantom Lady), it’s not even thriller material until about half an hour before the end. The middle act deals with Harry’s proposal to Deborah, the modern girl who’s promising to emancipate him from the psychological baggage of the house and the relatives. She agrees to marry him but they have a major problem: where are they going to live? Instead of doing the obvious thing (at least to me) of leaving that big old overstuffed Victoran house to his sisters and finding himself and Deborah a place of their own, Harry suggests that his sisters look for a new place so he can live with Deborah at the old homestead. Only every time Harry thinks he’s found a suitable new place for his sisters, Lettie finds something wrong with it and vetoes the deal. Instead the sisters suggest that Harry and Deborah can live in the guest house, which both Harry and Deborah understandably reject. The issue becomes so impossible that ultimately Harry and Deborah decide to take a train to New York, get married there and abandon Corinth forever, but on the night they’re scheduled to leave Lettie has either a real or faked spasm of illness, she’s confined to her bed for weeks and she successfully guilt-trips Harry into abandoning his marriage plans – whereupon Deborah accepts John Warren’s proposal and marries him three weeks later.

The news that her rival for Harry’s affections has taken herself out of the running by marrying someone else propels Lettie into an instant recovery – and the disgusted Harry, realizing there’s no other way for him to escape the iron control of his younger sister, decides to kill her with a poison Lettie had bought earlier to put down the old and terminally ill family dog, “Worry.” He sneaks it into a cup of hot cocoa he’s made her, but Lettie offers to take a cup to Hester upstairs. She walks carrying both cups and we in the audience immediately realize that she’s going to switch the two cups and give Hester the poisoned one. Hester dies and Lettie is accused of murdering her – after all, she bought the poison and she was the one who gave Hester the fatal cup – and Harry is distraught that his sister is going to be put to death for a crime he committed. But it’s not until the eve of the execution that he decides to do something about it; he writes a full confession and goes to the prison where Lettie is about to be hanged to give it to the warden. The warden reads it over and says he doesn’t believe a word of it – he thinks Harry is a loving brother who just wants to get his sister freed – but if Lettie confirms it, he’ll call the governor and ask for a reprieve and ultimately a pardon. Only Lettie doesn’t confirm it: in a brilliantly cutting confrontation scene she tells her brother that she’s willing to die because she will condemn him to guilt, sorrow and suffering for the rest of his life.

That is how the movie should have ended, but both the Production Code Administration and the “suits” at Universal objected to an ending in which an innocent person would be executed for murder while the real killer goes free. (Director Fritz Lang and writer Dudley Nichols would have the same problem with the Production Code Administration in 1946 on another Universal film, Scarlet Street, in which Edward G. Robinson killed Joan Bennett and let her boyfriend, Dan Duryea, take the fall.) Universal reportedly shot five different endings for Uncle Harry, intending to preview them all and use whichever one the preview audience liked best, and the one they went with was the old chestnut: “It was all a dream!” In that one Deborah Brown returns to the attic where Harry has fallen asleep and tells him that she didn’t marry John Warren after all and she’s still available if she wants him – and Hester responds to the good news while Lettie isn’t seen at all because Geraldine Fitzgerald realized how stupid this ending was and refused to participate in it. Joan Harrison so resented the change that she walked out of her Universal contract (though she returned two years later to produce Robert Montgomery’s film noir Ride the Pink Horse) and, when Charles Feldman wrote a public response to a critic who’d credited him with the film’s quality and said it was all Joan Harrison’s work, Harrison wrote him a scathing reply to the effect that it was nice to have his support after the fact, but it would have been nicer if he’d defended her work before the film was released instead of going along with the Universal executives who’d taken the film away from her and letting them undercut her authority.

Still, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry is a great film; producer Harrison and director Siodmak not only assembled a great cast, they gave George Sanders a role in which he managed to turn his usual unctuousness and sense of world-weariness towards playing a character we were supposed to like (as he would do again two years later in Douglas Sirk’s Lured, a first-rate film which also features a great dramatic performance by Lucille Ball – “Yes, you read that right,” I’ve said in previous posts on this blog and elsewhere; in films like Dance, Girl, Dance, The Big Street and DuBarry Was a Lady Ball established herself as a first-rate dramatic actress with a special flair for playing bitches, and it’s only because of her mega-success on TV as a slapstick comedienne that modern audiences think of her as nothing but “Lucy”), and they turned Geraldine Fitzgerald into a force of nature and Ella Raines into the symbol of modernity we’re hoping will pull Sanders away from that musty old Victorian past his relatives have stuck him in and into the present.