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Robert Siodmak the wily designer, weaving patterns: "I start out with a line. Then I draw another line. Then I draw another..." The joke is that the uncle is just a middle brother, a weak-kneed bachelor (George Sanders) stranded in small-town New Hampshire with a dotty widow (Moyna MacGill) and a hot hypochondriac (Geraldine Fitzgerald) for sisters. The clan is Depression-busted but still nested in a mansion, stifled with the submerged incestuous desires of expiring aristocracy. In steps the New York fashion ace (Ella Raines), who brings a dash of Hawksian fortitude to the surroundings, promptly understands the innuendo of the telescope in the attic, and looks enough like Fitzgerald to set the peculiar triangle in motion. "Are we going to move out, or are they going to move in?" Trafficking in sabotaged relationships and perverse awakenings, the ironic farce is couched in provincial American snapshots as fond and as sardonic as any in Shadow of a Doubt: The coed softball match, the barbershop quartet, the ice-cream parlor for biddies, all the Nabokovian delectations that modulate toward the image of the poisoned cup of hot chocolate. Siodmak's investigation of suppressed and stirred selves not only allows Sanders to look naked and touchingly unguarded without his mordant veneer, but also lets Fitzgerald bloom, one moment a premature spinster glowing at her vanity table and the next like Electra in severe blacks, exulting in her mocking triumph at the gallows. The censors can add as many safety-hatch dream codas as they want, but they can't erase the gleam in the negligee-clad heroine's eye as she sizes up her brother and murmurs, "We understand each other." With Sara Allgood, Samuel S. Hinds, Harry von Zell, Judy Clark, and Coulter Irwin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |