6.7 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.6 |
Bachelor Harry Quincey, head designer in a small-town cloth factory, lives with his selfish sisters, glamorous hypochondriac Lettie and querulous widow Hester. His developing relationship with new colleague Deborah Brown promises happiness at last...thwarted by passive, then increasingly active opposition from one sister. Will Harry resort to desperate measures?
Starring: George Sanders (I), Geraldine Fitzgerald (I), Ella Raines, Sara Allgood, Moyna MacGillFilm-Noir | 100% |
Drama | 10% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.37:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 16-bit)
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 3.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
How do you feel about twists? Do you like to be artfully misdirected, led down a veritable garden path only to discover that some central point you thought was happening actually wasn’t, a la The Sixth Sense? Or do you like your surprises to be almost karmic in their revelatory powers, as in Planet of the Apes? What about a twist that was imposed from “above,” as it were, as in The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry? This 1945 potboiler was based on a rather successful play (titled simply Uncle Harry on Broadway) by a Carnegie Tech professor named Thomas Job, a play which posited a meek little man named Uncle Harry (played by Joseph Schildkraut in the stage version) who finds his life controlled by his two oppressive sisters and who constructs an artful plan to murder one of them, leaving the other to take the fall for the crime. Uncle Harry traded on a certain Southern Gothic atmosphere (despite being set in Canada), one which exploited roiling family dysfunctions in somewhat the same way that The Little Foxes did, and it offered one surprise early on—a supposedly anonymous gentleman at a bar begins talking about a notorious murder case where the culprit is about to be hanged. This gentleman then goes on to confess that he, too, is a murderer but has gotten away with his crime. Of course it’s Uncle Harry himself, and his reminiscences provide the bulk of the rest of the play. Hollywood in the forties had to couch nefarious murderers in contextual formulations where they had to pay for their crimes, and so right off the bat scenarist Stephen Longstreet probably had his work cut out for him. The “solution” that censors evidently required of Longstreet and director Robert Siodmak to adapt a play built around a sanguine killer is so patently artificial, and so almost offensive, that it hardly qualifies as a true “twist,” and simply sits there as a consternation producing coda. What just happened? may well be the response many viewers have when the film suddenly lurches out of what had been at least a reasonably compelling narrative to deliver a “happily ever after” denouement that simply does not fit with the rest of the film’s rather morbid sensibilities. While the “twist” won’t be overtly detailed here, suffice it to say that it makes much of the following summary of the film’s plot a completely moot point, since it simply negates the plot whole cloth in the film’s final minutes.
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. While this supplement free presentation has plenty of breathing room even on a BD-25 for consistently high bitrates, this is one of the more problematic transfers we've seen from Olive, due to extremely variable quality of the elements. Well above average amounts of damage, including actual chunks of missing information on individual frames, makes this a somewhat treacherous viewing experience, with quite a few blemishes, scratches, nicks and the like also recurring with a fair amount of regularity. It seems at least possible that some of this was sourced from dupe elements (or at least elements further down the generational line than the bulk of the transfer), for certain scenes become quite a bit muddier and grainier, only to snap back to the generally watchable if modest levels of most of the presentation. Clarity and sharpness are average, but contrast is generally quite good. Despite an abundance of rather nattily patterned costumes (hey, maybe Harry designed them!), there are no resolution issues and no signs of things like moiré or aliasing.
As with the video presentation, the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono audio on The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry struggles at times to overcome what are probably inherent age related defects of the stems. There's evident hiss in the quieter moments, which isn't that much of a problem, but there are also strange spikes and valleys in the amplitude throughout the soundtrack, again perhaps indicating this has been sourced from disparate elements. On the whole, there's nothing horrible here, for all dialogue can be discerned quite easily, but as with the video presentation, this is a modest offering at best.
No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.
Had Universal been a little more courageous at fighting the censors, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry might have been a captivating little thriller, one buoyed by some great work by Geraldine Fitzgerald. As it stands, it's an almost deliberately annoying piece by the time it wends toward a completely improbable happy ending. If you're jonesin' for a crackling film about a murderous uncle, stick with Shadow of a Doubt instead.
Hot Spot
1941
1949
Warner Archive Collection
1947
Limited Edition to 3000
1954
1946
1955
1948
Warner Archive Collection
1947
1950
1942
1946
Warner Archive Collection
1952
4K Restoration
1946
1944
1945
Warner Archive Collection
1949
1946
Warner Archive Collection
1947
Limited Edition to 3000 - SOLD OUT
1950
1946