The Unseen

This picture has been on TV but I hadn't seen it before. I disagree with some reviewers and I thought it was a first-rate mystery but which was marred by a confusing ending. There was a rush to explain motivations and circumstances, all of which left me further in the dark than before.

The cast was just fine and the tragic Gail Russell was lovely to look at, although lacking some depth as an actress. The dependable Herbert Marshall lends strong support and Joel McCrea is his usual stalwart self. There is a lot to like here until you get to the last 5 minutes; hasty contrivances and omitted rationale are always annoying. Shown at Capitolfest, Rome, NY, 8/19.

******* 7/10 - Website no longer prints my star rating.

Gail Russell becomes governess to Joel McCrea's two motherless children. McCrea is a moody fellow. He gets sleeping pills from neighborhood doctor Herbert Marshall, and says that his children were spoiled by their unseen grandmother. The girl, Nona Griffith, is a sweet little thing, but the boy, Richard Lyon, takes a dislike to Miss Russell, seems to have a lot of money, and makes phone calls he says he didn't. Miss Griffith also tries to keep secrets. The house is an old, gloomy, run-down place, and after midnight there are signs that there's some stranger there.

It's an Old Dark House movie, and the unraveling of its mysteries make up the bulk of its length. Miss Russell goes through the movie with an expression of wide-eyed innocence that formed the basis of her star persona in this period. She stands in for the audience as a spectator to the disquieting behavior around her. McCrea shows that his distracted comedy shtick can be applied to drama as well.

Despite Raymond Chandler being one of the screen writers of this movie, I thought it depended far more on the atmosphere of the movie than the substance of its plot. Director Lewis Allen and cinematographer John Seitz offer that in gobs, and the actors so their jobs well enough to provide a good movie, if the audience be willing. It's an efficient studio picture that kept me interested through the end.

This film was clearly based on a rather feeble story about an empty house, mysterious lights in the cellar, vicious murders committed by a shadow in an alley, and so on, and although Raymond Chandler was brought in as a screenwriter to try to give it some muscle, that effort failed. The direction by Lewis Allen is clearly hopeless. All the cast look ill at ease, as if they had no idea what the director expected of them, and they found the story unconvincing. Herbert Marshall is stiff, and we can see him thinking: 'I'm getting too old for this kind of thing,' and his body language suggests he is resenting the weak direction. It is tragic to see the soulful, velvety-eyed 21 year-old Gail Russell looking so sad and so lost in this film. As for Joel McCrea, not only was he miscast as the grumpy widower whom Russell is meant to fall for, he looks even more lost than Gail Russell does, and flounders around not knowing how to behave. Lewis Allen had the previous year directed the delightful OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY (1944), where Gail Russell played the young Cornelia Otis Skinner with charm and conviction. And it was only two years later that Russell made what was probably her finest film, ANGEL AND THE BADMAN (1947, see my review), which is one of the greatest classics of the screen and captures all of her magical charm. So what went wrong this time? How did the rapport between Russell and Allen collapse? Why does everyone look so uncomfortable? Russell died of alcoholism at the age of only 36 in 1961. By 1950, her drinking was already so serious that she was becoming unemployable. But surely she cannot have become an alcoholic already by the age of 21, in 1945, so that cannot be the cause of the malaise seen in this picture. We know that Russell received a lot of moral support from John Wayne in ANGEL AND THE BADMAN, so that would have pulled her through. In this earlier film, the lack of even the most rudimentary chemistry between her and Joel McCrea is palpable, and it must have thrown her into a depression that she could not relate to him at all, and he refused to relate to her. And, as already noted, Herbert Marshall was 'getting too old for this kind of thing' and probably did not have the energy to try to prop up Russell as he might have done when younger. The two children in this film do very well, and Phyllis Brooks is excellent as the venomous, scheming Maxine. Maybe it could have worked. But it didn't.

A governess walks into a situation that tests her mettle. The father is cold and unfriendly and while she makes friends with the little girl, the boy immediately despises her. The pacing is weak and the plot rather stretched, but it keeps one's interest. There is some gaslighting going on, but mostly its a very basic mystery. The little boy is really quite good in his derisive role. Some of the significant events unfold too fast and we really don't understand why people keep coming and going.

Wealthy widower "Fielding" (Joel McCrae) hires "Miss Howard" (a rather bland Gail Russell) to be the governess to this children - the rather obnoxious "Barnaby" (Richard Lyon) and the rather more benign "Ellen" (Nona Griffith). The young boy likes to wind her up, he has secret telephone conversations and those, coupled with stories about a mysteriously empty house next door, set the scene for a rather torrid time for the young woman who is gradually falling - "Jane Eyre" style - for her boss. He is friendly with a local doctor (Herbert Marshall) and she is befriended by "Marian" (Isobel Elsom) but can either of them help to assuage her incrementally increasing fears as she is certain that something terrible has happened - and may be about to happen again! McCrae doesn't actually feature so much here and when he does he isn't quite the character he needed to be to make this rather ordinary story deliver. The young Lyon is probably the stand-out actor - he really does manage to get under the finger nails, but otherwise it's all rather too easily guessable with performances that are very much join-the-dots. Eighty minutes felt quite long, and though it's not dreadful, it's just all a bit routine with shades of "Gaslight" (1944) to it.