The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry

The fourth of Siodmak’s Universal noirs also marked his second collaboration with Phantom Lady producer—and frequent Hitchcock screenwriter—Joan Harrison, then employed as the studio’s first female executive. George Sanders is at once disarmingly tender and unnervingly opaque as Harry Quincey, a mild-mannered bachelor descended from a once-prominent family in the New England town of Corinth. Employed as a designer at the local textile mill, Harry lives with his two grown sisters: widowed Hester (Moyna Macgill) and never-married Lettie (Geraldine Fitzgerald), a suave, bedridden beauty with a fiercely possessive attachment to her equally devoted older brother. The trio share a modestly comfortable, if directionless, existence in the fading family manse—until glamorous outsider Deborah (Ella Raines, in the third of her four outings with Siodmak) arrives from New York, disturbing the fragile psychic equilibrium of the siblings’ domestic status quo, and setting the stage for a profoundly unsettling study of obsession, jealousy, and the perils of codependency. 35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.