The New Pictures

Uncle Harry (Universal) is a thriller, produced by Alfred Hitchcock's onetime secretary, Joan Harrison, whose murder thriller Phantom Lady (TIME, Feb. 24, 1944) established her as one of Hollywood's talented producers. Her second offering, a Broadway play adaptation, is again directed by able Robert Siodmak, and again features a vivid performance by Ella Raines. Uncle Harry is better done than its predecessor, more human, subtler, more exciting.

Harry (George Sanders) is the kind of man everybody likes and nobody quite respects--a man rendered permanently infantile by his own gentleness, by his family's standing in their small New England town, and above all by his bickering, manless sisters, the widow Hester (Moyna Macgill) and the semi-invalid Lettie (Geraldine Fitzgerald). Lettie in particular takes care that life shall never disturb him with a breath of fresh air.

When a strong cool blast of it (Ella Raines) wakes him up and threatens to make a man of him, everyone except Harry realizes that Sister Lettie's feelings about him exceed the sisterly. From there on the story is ever-crueler melodrama, culminating in a tacked-on ending which the audience is requested not to tell--presumably on the assumption that everybody has the right to feel sold out.

Despite its silly ending, Uncle Harry is worth seeing. Its hints of psychological incest, which are so arranged that you can take them or leave them, are even more interesting in their Hays Office aspects than as drama. The acutely recorded small-town characters and atmospheres, and the intense performances of all four principal players, are something more. Especially notable is Geraldine Fitzgerald's portrayal of the harboring sister--the first role in years which has given this actress opportunity to show more than a fraction of her worth.

Victim's Explanation. Watching her play minor roles in major films like Wilson, major roles in minor films like Shining Victory, discerning cinemaddicts have long been puzzled by Geraldine Fitzgerald's fourth-magnitude stardom.

Because this particular victim of Holly wood's wonderful ways happens to be 1) intelligent, 2) candid, 3) now free to talk -- her long-term contract with Warner has just expired ("thank God") -- Miss Fitzgerald has finally explained all. Any Hollywoodenhead would insist that it was entirely her own fault, and, in a measure, she would cheerfully agree.

The trouble started in the rush of her first success when Dark Victory and Wuthering Heights made it clear that she would soon become a major star. David Selznick wanted her for the title role in Hitchcock's smash Rebecca, but she turned it down. She was under contract to Warner for half of each year; if she worked for Selznick, he would own the other half. She preferred to spend it with her husband, in Ireland. That sort of independence is neither admired nor understood in Hollywood. It didn't exactly enhance her stock, either, when she returned from Ireland pregnant.

She began getting second-grade, left over and plain trash roles. She was done out of a long-promised chance to play Emily Bronte. She went to Broadway and enjoyed herself thoroughly in a play by Irwin Shaw (Sons and Soldiers). The fact that it flopped sent her Hollywood stock still lower.

Miss Fitzgerald was now well-foundered in that strange limbo where it is far worse to have started brilliantly and to have slopped off, than to be just starting; where everyone, forgetting what went wrong and why, assigns it simply to lack of ability; where it is silly to thionk of getting a release from a strangling contract; where boredom, frustration and hopelessness conspire against the will until as she says, "all you can hope for is that sooner or later you will hit bottom...." She hit bottom in the appalling Ladies Courageous (TIME, April 3, 1944).

Artist's Salvation. When her friend Joan Harrison offered her the role of Lettie, Miss Fitzgerald wanted no part of it. ("You can see," she says, "I plan my career very carefully.") She knew it was a good role, but she disliked it.

Robert Siodmak sold it to her-- as an artist's duty toward a good piece of work, likeable or not. When she finally got into the part she fell in love with it. She feel so hard that the Director Siodmak, whose worries about Hayes Office approval must have been a little like a man wondering how Queen Victoria would take to an off color joke, had to tone down her performance. But despite all precautions, Miss Fitzgerald's salvation from limbo gleams handsomely through the Hays.

Over 21 (Columbia) takes the sad case of a newspaper editor (Alexander Knox) who joined the Army in order to be worthy to write about the postwar world, and proves beyond dispute that men of 39 compete with men of 21 at the risk of their sanity and whatever physique the years have left them.

First, the editor's wife (Irene Dunne), a Hollywood playwright, sets up light housekeeping in an extremely lightly assembled cottage near his Miami officer-candidate school; she sees him only spasmodically, when he sprints in, gasping for a change of socks and psychoses. Then the editor's boss (Charles Coburn), a pitiless character interested in nothing except steaming copy, adds his own kind of harassment, first by long- distance, later in person. Adding to the reeign of horror are the editor's commanding officer (Charles Evans) and his terrifying wife and mother-in-law. Dropping in one afternoon for cocktails, this formitable trio stages the year's funniest social fiasco.

At the end of all this farcical rope, the editor hangs up the picture in a heartfelt editorial. By this time Over 21 has developed most, if not all, of the cinema possibilities in Actress-Author Ruth Gordon's original stage play.

That moderately successful comedy, besides being semiautobiographical, was supposed to have echoed, faintly at least, the fuming sincerity of PM's Ralph Ingersoll and the virtually unduplicable wit of Dorothy Parker. Miss Gordon was well qualified to reverberate the Parker echoes. Miss Dunne, despite her own kinds of charm and humor, is not. Mr. Knox, whose youthful appearance will surprise those who have seen him only in the title role of Wilson* is superb as the editor, whether chattering at the edge of mental exhaustion, or putting all possible gusto into a reading of a post-Wilsonian editorial. Good shot: the commanding officer's patronizing offer to help his hosts extract a frozen ice tray, and the cataclysmic result.

* The $5,200,000 Wilson, which grossed less than half its cost on its carriage-trade run ($1.00-1.50), has recently been re-released at popular prices (65-85-c-). 2Oth Century-Fox at best will break even.

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