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He's born with the end of the First World War and dies at the height of the Second, his father (Spencer Tracy) is a lord regaling the audience, "I probably own this theater." Humble beginnings of the Canadian transplant in London, the unseen boy is the main point of discourse with the missus (Deborah Kerr). When Junior needs a pricey surgery, Dad sets fire to his floundering business for the insurance money and Tracy's glare split in shadow becomes more evocative than anything in Fleming's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. ("Quite a glow in the sky," it yields to the son's birthday cake.) A matter of school mortgage dissuades the headmaster (Felix Aylmer) from expelling "the little stinker," the family doctor (Ian Hunter) diagnoses a deficient moral compass, the ruined associate (Mervyn Johns) drops by the office before diving out the window. "You can put away that ruler. You haven't drawn a straight line for years." The Langley-Morley play shot as a companion piece to Keeper of the Flame, a procession of stately long takes modulated by George Cukor around the void that is a couple's possibly imaginary rotten fruit. Corrupt prosperity and doting self-deception make for dubious parentage, it turns the hellion into a chip off the old unscrupulous block and Mom into a hunched lush rattling inside the mansion. Tracy because it's The Power and the Glory, meaning it's also Citizen Kane, thus the love nest with the wry secretary (Leueen MacGrath). (The affably seamy private detective is invited upstairs with consequences for Wyler's Carrie, "some of the details they print now are absolutely disgusting.") Unbroken ten-minute blocks separated by years, a monster seeking a grandchild is the upshot. Surely a root and source of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "Well, perhaps marriage is what's needed." "That's rather a drastic cure, isn't it?" With Walter Fitzgerald, Tilsa Page, James Donald, Ernest Jay, Colin Gordon, Clement McCallin, and Harriette Johns. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |