Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Blu-ray Movie Review

Giving #NationalSiblingsDay a whole new twist.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 11, 2015

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.

An avuncular sounding narrator introduces us to a sprawling town, announcing that it and its citizens are “just like you,” in one of those quasi- subliminal linking gambits that posits a homogeneous environment that radiates peace and security. It is in fact much the same gambit that Alfred Hitchcock undertook when he depicted the “shenanigans” of another seemingly benign uncle in a film which predates The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry by a couple of years, 1943’s Shadow of a Doubt. In this particular film, it’s notable that Uncle Harry (George Sanders) is not in fact anyone’s uncle, but has assumed that honorific title through the years for his generally familial ambience with his fellow townsfolk. Harry isn’t particularly happy about this prefix being attached to his name, though, feeling it makes him seem too old (a completely different—and somewhat less acerbic— complaint than the stage version of the character laments over in the play).

Harry may not be an uncle, but he is most certainly a brother, and his home life is something of a ping pong match between his two sisters, elderly widow Hester (Moyna Macgill) and the younger hypochondriac Lettie (Geraldine Fitzgerald). Early scenes detail a rather Freudian interrelationship between these three, with Lettie obviously feeling something that’s not exactly platonic about her brother. Harry at least has his “career” to take his mind off of his family problems. Like virtually everyone else in the town, he works at a local mill where he’s in charge of crafting patterns for fabrics. It gives the character a not exactly subtle overly structured, and probably feminized, air that will play out as the plot begins to wend its way through a pretty turgid and soap operatic set of machinations.

Things seem to be looking up for Harry when a stylish designer from the firm’s New York office named Deborah Brown (Ella Raines) comes to the plant and takes an interest in Harry. A somewhat awkward romance blooms, one that encounters the repeated, and possibly psychopathic, thorn of Lettie. Lettie is obviously not happy her brother may be trotting off to his own “happily ever after,” though it’s the fact that she and Hester may need to “trot off,” i.e., leave the family mansion, if Harry and Deborah go through with their plans to marry, that creates much of the drama of the middle part of the film.

A somewhat disturbing angle involving an ill dog leads to the purported “thriller” element of the film, when poison is purchased and then “mysteriously” makes its way to Hester’s coffee cup, even though Harry intended it for Lettie. Due to a series of convenient plot points, Lettie is accused of the killing and Harry suddenly sees an answer to all of his problems. In the meantime, though, Deborah has grown sick of waiting for him and has ostensibly moved on to another paramour.

Except—well, not, and that’s all that can be disclosed without spoiling what is certainly one of the more boneheaded “twists” in the annals of film. The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry might have been a rather chilling examination of family dysfunction and the scabrous effects of guilt had it simply ended with the fantastic showdown between Harry and Lettie on the eve of her execution by the state. Instead a patently ridiculous coda was tacked on, evidently at the insistence of the still powerful Hays Office, something that completely recasts the bulk of what has gone before. It’s a silly undercutting of what to that point has been an at least passable character study of a henpecked male trying to escape the clutches of a desperately needy sibling. The film features a great supporting performance by Geraldine Fitzgerald, and Ella Raines is also excellent, if also obviously stuffed into a Lauren Bacall template in terms of her hairstyle and general demeanor.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

No supplements are offered on this Blu-ray disc.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.