Getting the Hollywood Treatment: The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry
An obscure film from the Golden Age of Hollywood juggles a moral conundrum: should Uncle Harry get away with murder?
YouTube’s catalogue of old movies is constantly growing, but while a few classic gems do occasionally turn up, most of them are obscure and forgotten. However, these films can often give us a fascinating insight into Hollywood’s inner workings. A case in point is a film I had never heard of before.
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (Watch on YouTube) was released by Universal Pictures in 1945, starring George Sanders as Harry, with Geraldine Fitzgerald as Lettie, Moyna MacGill as Hester and Ella Raines as Deborah. (For more see IMDb entry)
Spoiler Alert: This study discusses the plots of both the film and the source play in full, including their endings.
Henry Melville Quincey is the last male in a once rich and important New England family and lives with his two unmarried sisters, Lettie and Hester, in their sprawling ancestral home. However, the family money having all been lost in the Great Depression, Harry must work for a living to support himself and keep his sisters in the manner to which they are accustomed. Harry is employed as a pattern designer by the local cotton mill, where he is known as ‘Uncle Harry’ by his younger colleagues, and comes home every evening to listen to his sisters’ constant bickering with each other and their housekeeper, Nona.
When Deborah, a New York fashion designer, arrives to work alongside him, Harry falls in love and they are soon engaged to be married. While Harry’s older sister, Hester, is happy for him, his younger sister, Lettie, is consumed with jealousy. For months, Lettie refuses to settle on a house she and Hester could move into and so allow Harry and Deborah to marry, all the while using her purported ill-health to keep Harry from leaving her. As a last resort, Lettie goes to Deborah and tries to talk her out of marrying Harry, but she refuses to give Harry up. On the very day that Deborah and Harry have decided to run away and get married, Lettie stages one of her ‘turns’, forcing Harry to choose between her and Deborah. When Harry refuses to leave Lettie, Deborah can take no more and walks away.
When, a few weeks later, he hears that Deborah has married their boss, Harry is heartbroken. The news sparks a row between his sisters in which Hester reveals that Lettie deliberately came between them. This realisation drives Harry to attempting to kill Lettie with the very poison she bought months earlier to put down the family’s elderly dog. However, Lettie unwittingly exchanges her poisoned cup of cocoa with Hester’s, and it is she who dies.
Having seen the poison labelled in Lettie’s handwriting, and heard their last violent argument, Nona immediately accuses Lettie of Hester’s murder. Harry seizes the opportunity to get his revenge on Lettie after all and allows her to be found guilty of the murder and condemned to death. In time, however, Harry’s conscience gets the better of him and on the eve of Lettie’s hanging, he goes to the prison governor’s office and confesses to the crime. Despite Harry’s desperate efforts, the governor will not believe him. Lettie herself rejects his gesture, condemning him to live the rest of his life with the knowledge of what he has done.
Will Harry get away with murder? I’ll answer that question in due course.
The film has all the elegance and charm one would expect from the Golden Age of Hollywood; however, it also has its shortcomings, especially in its casting.
George Sanders is cast against type as an amiable, rather passive bachelor and is much too suave and handsome to appear as browbeaten as Harry needs to be. While Moyna MacGill is all one would expect from a warm-hearted but petulant middle-aged widow, Geraldine Fitzgerald gives an exquisite performance but is much too beautiful, slim and elegant to be convincing as an embittered spinster who lies around feigning illness all day. Ella Raines is passable as a New York career woman, but she seems much too sophisticated to be attracted to a small-town salaryman like Harry.
At the same time, considering the family’s acerbic dynamics, the lengths Lettie goes to in order to thwart Harry’s marriage and the extreme nature of Harry’s revenge, not to mention the film’s bizarre ending (again, more of that anon), it is clear that, in true Hollywood fashion, the source material’s dark undertones have been whitewashed.
The film was based on the play Uncle Harry which ‘shocked Broadway’ and ran for 430 performances in 1942/43. The play’s author, Thomas Job, was born in Wales and moved to the United States in the 1930s to pursue a Ph.D. in Dramatic Criticism at Yale University. He practised as an academic, a playwright and a screenwriter until his untimely death at 45. As well as Uncle Harry, he is also known for a stage adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, and the screenplay for The Two Mrs. Carrolls, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck.
As a hit Broadway play, Uncle Harry was an attractive property for the Hollywood studios. However, its ‘shocking’ content made it problematic, and it was passed around several studios until Universal agreed to film it. It was produced by Joan Harrison, an English-born screenwriter and producer, who is best remembered for her long-time collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, and was directed by Robert Siodmak, a German-born director who worked in Hollywood from 1941–1951, making 23 films, many of which are considered classics of film noir.
From reading what little I could find about the play online, I developed a very strong suspicion that the film’s producers had made fundamental changes to the play in adapting it to the screen, so I hunted down a copy in order to make a comparison.
Uncle Harry: the Play
Uncle Harry takes place in a small English town between 1908 and 1912 and goes as follows:
Harry is hanging about in the local tavern where he is ostracised by his old friends and disliked by the barmaid. A little the worse for drink, Harry forces his attentions onto a hapless travelling salesman and tells him that he (Harry) is a murderer and, in fact, is telling everyone that he is a murderer in the hope that Lettie will let him be. He then proceeds to tell the salesman his story.
Harry’s father was a well-to-do wool merchant who left his three children a legacy which is enough for them to live on, as long as they live together. As a result, Harry has to live with his two spinster sisters, Hester who is petulant and domineering, and Lettie who is waspish and clingy. His sisters spoil and pamper him and are constantly bickering and vying for his attention.
Although he is not qualified, an amateur artist himself, Harry teaches drawing at the local grammar school. The boys have dubbed him ‘Uncle Harry,’ which reflects how the townsfolk see him, as amiable but ineffectual.
One afternoon, Harry comes home from school to find his sisters having afternoon tea with his former fiancée, Lucy. She has just arrived from London to announce her engagement to George, an affable and successful engineer. Hester and Lettie are happy to hear the news and congratulate themselves on separating Lucy from Harry, thus giving Lucy this great opportunity. Although they broke up three years earlier, Harry still has romantic feelings for Lucy and when they are alone, tries to rekindle them in her. Harry puts all the blame for their breakup on his sisters and does not understand that Lucy blames him as well for choosing his sisters over her.
Harry asks Lucy if she would come back to him if his sisters were no longer around. Nonplussed, Lucy gives a cryptic reply which Harry misunderstands, but when George joins them later, she tries to make it clear to Harry that she has every intention of marrying George.
Deluded into believing that Lucy will take him back, Harry initiates his plan to get rid of his sisters. First, he lays the foundations for a confrontation by lying to both his sisters about a broken teacup. Harry then persuades Lettie that it is time they put down their elderly dog. He sends her to buy poison from the chemist and then asks her to write a warning on the label. That evening he joins his friends at the tavern and tells them that Lettie wishes she could be rid of Hester. Among his friends is the chemist. Harry tells him that he knows nothing about Lettie buying poison or why she wants it.
On his return home he ensures that Nona, the housekeeper, will witness the ensuing events, and manoeuvres her towards finding the poison with Lettie’s writing on the label. Next, he stokes a violent row between his sisters which he pretends to mediate and asks Nona to make some hot chocolate to aid in a family reconciliation. Finally, Harry poisons one of the cups of cocoa and manipulates Lettie into taking it to Hester and ensuring that she drinks it. He leaves Nona to find Hester’s body.
On the day of Lettie’s trial for murdering Hester, Harry joins his friends in the tavern as they wait for the verdict, which they all believe will inevitably be guilty. They are disgusted that Lettie is blaming Harry for Hester’s death, and are sympathetic with Harry, who, they all believe, did his best to help Lettie in his testimony, but inadvertently only made matters worse. Harry collapses in front of his friends when the guilty verdict is announced but is quite calm when Lucy comes to see him later at his request.
Harry takes it for granted that Lucy will come back to him, but Lucy is adamant she never had any such intention and now has even more reason not to marry him. She does not want to share in his family’s disgrace, and neither would any other woman. Harry realises he did it all for nothing.
On the eve of Lettie’s hanging, Harry goes to the prison governor’s office for one last visit with his sister. Up until then, Lettie has refused to see him and has maintained that he is to blame for the murder. Before Lettie arrives, Harry hands the governor a written full confession to the murder. The governor is stunned and has no idea what to do in this situation, and so, when Lettie comes in, he asks her for her response.
Lettie knows Harry well enough to recognise that he is not doing this for her, but because, having nothing left to live for, he wants to die. She predicts that he will be facing a hell of loneliness and guilt and is happy to let him. She would be facing the same if she were to live so she has made peace with her fate. She tells the governor the confession is only one of Harry’s fancies, says she will let the guilty verdict stand, and resists Harry’s pleas to finally let him have some control over his own life. The governor admires Lettie’s courage in not taking advantage of her brother’s self-sacrifice.
As Harry is ushered out of the governor’s office he laughs hysterically at the irony of his fate and determines to tell everyone that he is the one murderer who got away with it.
Having read the play, I can see now exactly why it was passed around the studios like a live grenade and had to be so radically rewritten for Hollywood. Uncle Harry goes against one of the major tenets of the Hays Code:
All criminal action has to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal should elicit sympathy from the audience, or the audience must at least be aware that such behaviour is wrong.
In Harry Quincey, Thomas Job not only gives us a protagonist who gets away with murder, but one that elicits some sympathy from the audience. What was Hollywood supposed to do with this?
The Hollywood Treatment
Uncle Harry can be categorised as a ‘well-made’ play, typical of the plays of the late 19th and early 20th century, on which many Hollywood films were based. They were naturalistic, psychological dramas and melodramas with elaborate, realistic sets which restricted the action to very few locations.
Hollywood could take advantage of the flexibility of film to ‘open up’ such a play by adding more locations, thus allowing for more movement and transition scenes between one dramatic point and the next. They would also often relocate the play to a similar American setting, in this case from smalltown Edwardian England to smalltown mid-century New England, which would also entail a change in the language. Meanwhile, as these plays were often wordy, as is Uncle Harry, they would also use images and action to substitute for much of the dialogue.
However, the biggest structural change made to Uncle Harry is to its timeline. In the play, all the interesting action has already taken place before it opens. A film audience would want to see how Harry’s romance begins, how it unfolds and how it is thwarted.
While these changes might seem superficial and incidental, in this case they also brought with them a very different approach to the story and characters.
In Edwardian England, where the social ideal is the gentleman on a private income, Harry’s situation, as a man living off inherited wealth, while somewhat restrictive, is socially acceptable. On the other hand, it would not be acceptable to American audiences and their values. Thus, the American Harry must work for a living, while the Quinceys’ social position, as coming from old money, allows his sisters to share the genteel social pretentions of the Edwardian upper and middle classes.
However, perhaps the most fundamental difference between the play and the film is in the personalities of the Quinceys and therefore the dynamics between them. In the play, both Hester and Lettie are overbearing and equally implicated in thwarting Harry’s hopes of marriage. In the film, Hester is much more sympathetic, and has nothing to do with alienating Deborah. Yet, while she seems to recognise what Lettie is up to, does nothing to stop her until it is too late.
Meanwhile, Lettie is characterised as solely responsible for alienating Deborah and intent on keeping Harry to herself. She is also much more antagonistic towards Hester, and while in the play, Harry lies and says that Lettie wants to be rid of Hester, in the film Lettie actually says it. In the play, Lettie is possessive of Harry, and at one point, cuddles up to him. The meaning of that gesture depends very much on the direction, but most reviews of the play suggest that Lettie’s feelings for her brother are incestuous. This is played up in the film, albeit subtly. Lettie acts towards Harry more like a wife than a sister, and, while Hester is happy to see Harry with Deborah, Lettie has to make an effort to seem so.
The change to the timeline also allows for a more sympathetic portrayal of Harry. In the play, Harry comes across as lazy, manipulative and selfish. He lets his sisters dominate and pamper him and does less than he could to contribute to the family’s income. One gets the impression that his feelings for Lucy are more proprietorial than profound, and that he did not make much of an effort to resist his sisters’ attempts to come between them. In contrast, in the film, Harry’s sisters are totally dependent on him, and he has sacrificed his own personal ambitions to support them. He shows his love for them by tolerating their attempts to dominate and pamper him and tries to act as peacekeeper between them. In his relationship with Deborah, he expresses profound love for her, while being too fond and naïve to recognise what Lettie is up to and is genuinely torn between his love for them both.
However, in both the play and the film, Harry’s weakness can be seen in a decisive action he could take but does not. In the play, while the Quinceys’ income is adequate to keep them all, it is modest. While his sisters have little choice in their lifestyle, as a man, Harry has the freedom and the means to move out on his own, get a job and support himself and a wife, leaving his sisters to live on their father’s legacy, but he does not. In the film, when Lettie refuses to choose a house in town to move into with Hester, Harry could arrange to move into another house himself in which to set up with Deborah and let his sisters remain in the ancestral home (after all he would still have to pay the rent for the second home, whoever lives there), but he does not.
In the film, Harry’s rehabilitation continues as the murder unfolds. In the play, it is obvious that not only is the murder premeditated, but that Harry has long been planning it. Moreover, he embarks on his plan based on a delusion. In the film, Harry embarks on the murder only after being driven to despair. His actions are not planned, but largely opportunistic.
In the film Lettie is characterised as even more callous and unsympathetic than in the play, and therefore more deserving of Harry’s resentment. While in the play it is Harry who suggests putting down the dog and manipulates Lettie into buying the poison, in the film, it is Lettie who decides to buy poison and, we can infer, puts the dog down without consulting her siblings. Harry simply takes advantage of his discovery of the poison bottle which she has already labelled.
In the play, the chemist identifies the poison as Prussic Acid and describes in detail the horrific death it could cause. Despite this, Harry has no qualms about continuing with his plan. In the film, Harry anxiously raises the topic of the poison with the chemist and is somewhat relieved when he describes the poison as an unspecified concoction of his own that causes an instant and painless death.
In the play, Harry plans to murder Hester and frame Lettie for the murder. We can also infer that he deliberately gives testimony that further implicates her. In the film, Harry only wants to kill Lettie and is horrified when he discovers that Hester has been given the poisoned cocoa. It is only when Nona accuses Lettie of murder that Harry grasps the opportunity to let her take the blame. However, in the trial he does not speak against her and is then driven to confess by a guilty conscience.
Does Harry get away with murder?
And so we come to the crucial question. Does Hollywood’s Harry get away with murder as he does in the play? Having reshaped Harry from a callous and deliberate murderer into a good man driven to murder by despair, will Hollywood be allowed to inflict on him no greater punishment than to live with his guilt? Did Universal get around the Hays Code and let Harry off scot free?
Predictably, the Production Code Association which enforced the Hays Code, did not find the play’s ending acceptable and stipulated that any film adapted from the play would only be approved with a different ending. As the property was passed around the different studios, different adaptations were written, and eventually the PCA tentatively accepted the ending of Universal’s first draft in which Harry, having gone insane with guilt, tells his story as he waits to be taken to a mental institution. However, Universal’s production manager did not believe the PCA would give a final approval to that ending and insisted on alternatives being shot.
Apparently five different endings were given test screenings before the final one was chosen. Given how bizarre that ending is, one can only imagine how bad the alternatives must have been for this one to win out.
So, how did Hollywood resolve this difficult conundrum? Brace yourself…it was all a dream.
It was only on a second viewing that I could see that the ending was not just tacked on after the play’s final scene. Before Harry carries out the murder, he sits down and contemplates the bottle of poison, then there is a slow cross fade into the next scene, an indication to the discerning viewer that what follows is a dream or reverie.
Having foreseen the outcome of carrying out his plan, Harry comes back to himself and thoughtfully pours the poison out. Then to his great joy, Deborah enters and tells him she could not go through with her proposed marriage as she is still in love with Harry. Having seen the light on, Hester enters, alive and well, and, when she hears that Harry and Deborah are about to run off and get married, she is overjoyed. The happy couple departs, leaving a disdainful message for Lettie.
So, Harry is not a murderer after all, just someone who is driven to contemplating murder, but then thinks better of it and, as a result, is duly rewarded.
The aftermath
According to the film’s credits, the play was adapted by Keith Winter and the screenplay was by Stephen Longstreet, while other sources state that Winter wrote the first draft of the screenplay, and that Longstreet was brought in later and completed the final draft. However, it is unclear who wrote the final ending. One source says that the director, Robert Siodmak wrote it, while another says that he refused to direct it himself so that another director had to be brought in to complete the shoot.
Whoever is responsible for the ending, it did not go down well with the viewing public. In fact, the studio tacitly acknowledged as much by placing a card at the end of the film, requesting that the audience not disclose the ending, so that their ‘friends may enjoy this picture’. The film did not do well at the box-office, was sold off and re-released after heavy editing as The Zero Murder Case.
Unhappy with the studio’s conduct in the affair, Joan Harrison ended her association with Universal Pictures and moved on to RKO. After this and, no doubt, many other instances of studio interference, Robert Siomak returned to Europe in 1951. As for Thomas Job, he moved to Hollywood, but any success he had there was short lived as he was dead within a year or two.
Although the play would need to be radically rewritten for a modern film audience, it might be time to revisit Uncle Harry. Our times are ripe for its moral ambiguity.
© Pauline Montagna 2024
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