The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) - film review

Harry Quincey lives in a small American town with his two sisters, the self-centred spinster Lettie and the good-natured widow Hester.  Since his family lost their fortune in the Great Depression, Harry has had to work as a fabric designer at the town mill, a modest job but one which provides an outlet for his creative leanings.  Harry’s humdrum life would have continued in this vein had it not been for the arrival of Deborah Brown, a colleague from another office.  For the first time in his life, Harry knows what it is to be in love and can hardly believe his good fortune when Deborah agrees to marry him.  The only person who is not pleased by this union is Lettie, who succeeds in driving Deborah away by refusing to leave the family home.  Harry comes across some poison which one of his sisters had bought some time ago to put their ailing dog out of his misery.  All he has to do is to put a few drops of the poison into Lettie’s cocoa and he will be rid of her forever.  Can it really be that easy...?

Between Phantom Lady (1944) and The Spiral Staircase (1945), director Robert Siodmak turned in this, one of his weirder film noir melodramas, based on a popular Broadway play by Thomas Job.  The film’s weirdness derives in part from the reluctance of its production company, Universal, to show anything which might in any way antagonise the censors.  Of all the major Hollywood studios, Universal was probably the one that was most compliant to the Hays Production Code, and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry bears this out with a vengeance.  If nothing else, the film provides a salutary lesson in what can happen if you allow yourself to be tyrannised by rules.   After all, rules are for girl guides, traffic wardens and pen-pushing bureaucrats, not artists.

Actually, it seems bizarre that Universal would want to adapt Job’s play, considering that incest, a no-go area as far as the Hays Office was concerned, featured so heavily in it.  With the references to incest dutifully excised, the film hardly makes any sense, since this takes away the motivation for why the characters behave as they do.  Not only is the dreaded I-word never eluded to, but it just seems implausible that the shy and sensitive Harry could ever have had any such dealings with his totally unsympathetic sister Lettie.  Fortunately, there are enough nods and winks in the performances to make up for any lack of clarity or logic in the screenplay.

More difficult to overlook is the film’s biggest cop out, the tagged-on happy ending.  The Hays Code insisted that in no film should a murderer be seen to go unpunished, so the obvious ending (in which Harry’s retribution is not execution but a life of unremitting guilt) would have been vetoed.  Consequently, Universal recorded several alternative censor-friendly endings and chose the one which achieved the most positive reaction from a preview audience.  Needless to say, the ending that was selected is the one you would most expect of a Hollywood production.  Yes, they all lived happily ever after (apart from the screenwriters, who probably shot themselves afterwards out of shame).

If it had not been for the ending, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry would probably be held in much higher esteem than it is.  For all its sins, it is a well-crafted film noir, slickly directed by Robert Siodmak, well-paced and offering gripping central performances from George Sanders and Geraldine Fitzgerald.  Sanders, unusually, is cast as a sympathetic underdog, and whilst he is convincing in the role, there is still a note of sinister villainy lurking somewhere in his portrayal.  There is no such ambiguity in Fitzgerald’s interpretation; her character is as cruel as they come, and her final scenes (before that ludicrous ending) succeed in sending a shiver down the spine.  

If Universal had been a little braver and not been so mindful of the censors’ red pen, this could have been one of the studio’s rare dramatic masterpieces.  The central themes of the original story - incest, guilt, desire and loathing - are highly appropriate for a film noir, and we can only guess at what Siodmak and his screenwriters might have come up with it they had been given more creative freedom.  But with its daring concoction of incest, lust and unpunished murder, could Thomas Job’s play ever have made it to the big screen intact in the 1940s?  Probably not.

© Derek Adamson 2010

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