That Uncertain Feeling (1941)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Really Surprised!

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

A really good film to doze off by. This is far better than taking sleeping tablets.When her friends persuade her to go to a psychoanalyst for her hiccups, Merle Oberon complies and finds analyst Alan Mowbray blaming her marriage to Melvyn Douglas as the culprit. It's also there that she meets off-the-wall patient Burgess Meredith. The two pursue an affair and she soon separates from Douglas.The film is just too much to believe. On the rebound,Douglas starts an affair with his attorney's ditsy secretary, a very young Eve Arden.The film is totally unappealing and unassuming to say the least. If this is comedy, forget it!!!!!

THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING is based on a French play by Victorien Sardou. He was the leading French dramatist for most of the 19th Century, but his specialty of "the well made play" was lampooned into oblivion by later writers (most notably George Bernard Shaw, who labeled such carefully plotted works as "Sardoodledum"). Actually, like such good 20th Century dramatists as Terrance Rattigan, a really good drama can survive it's structural mechanics if the characterizations stand out to be true. Sardou's serious plays (like his historical plays) are too stiff to work today. But his lighter fare might still be able to work if up-dated.Lubitsch reset the story into modern New York. Melvin Douglas is married to Merle Oberon, and is a successful attorney. But their seemingly happy marriage has hit a dull spot. He is not aware of this but she is noticing his idiosyncrasies, and finding some too annoying for words: His habit of sticking his finger into her middle (playfully, of course) and saying "Keex" drives her up a wall. She tries a popular psychiatrist (Alan Mowbray, in a kind of reprise of a similar role from Lubitsch's DESIRE). Then she goes to an art gallery and meets eccentric pianist Burgess Meredith. He is a man who seems more full of sour, but honest, opinions about everything than he has musical talent. He goes from picture to picture telling Oberon what is wrong with each. "That painting won't live.", he declares of one work. Oberon, who can barely keep looking at it, says, "Thank God for that!".Meredith, with his sour view of most things, is soon ruining one of Douglas's business dinners (for a bunch of Hungarian businessmen, led by Sig Ruman). Douglas has a first rate Hungarian meal, complete with goulash for his guests, and even teaches - or tries to teach Oberon - to say a Hungarian toast for their guests. But Meredith dominates the evening, by insisting on playing a classical piece of piano music, and then 19 variations he has composed on it.Gradually Douglas tries to restore his marriage, but finds Oberon in a deep commitment to Meredith. This leads to one of the best scenes when Douglas and his partner Harry Davenport try to stage an act of cruelty against Oberon for divorce purposes. To do this they have to have Eve Arden as an unsuspecting witness to an escalating argument leading to a slap in the face. But each time Douglas can't bring himself to do it, until he basically downs two or three drinks. In the meantime Arden keeps noticing that Davenport (supposedly giving her dictation) is actually doing everything over and over again, including snapping his fingers at the moment that Douglas and Oberon are supposed to start their argument. The film ends with Oberon considering the good and bad points of Douglas and Meredith, to reach her conclusion about who to stay with. It is an obvious choice, perhaps, and it may seem to take her too long to decide, but the three leads give bright performances (supported by Davenport and Arden and the others). Not on the level of THE MERRY WIDOW or NINOTCHKA, but worth watching for some satisfactory chuckles.

Loved "That Uncertain Feeling" (1941)! Here, a superb, substantive, yet oft-times simultaneously silly, screenplay (adapted from the stage) meets first-rate actors. (The beautiful Merle Oberon is at her comedic best.) What makes this a must-see film is the palpable pathos swirling just beneath it all. In lesser hands (actors and writers all) this might've fallen into the snidely melodramatic or the mildly comedic.By the by, who says the feeling man is dead? The reviews give credence to the fact that-- whether in their teens, twenties, or, like me, in their fifties-- men enjoy romantic comedies as much as women. I suspect that any polls showing otherwise are eschew for the very reason that too many films today use a "straw man," where the male lead isn't much more than duplicitous, a nitwit, a heel (or all three). In "That Uncertain Feeling," a certain maturity and balance rules the writers. Sure, men AND women's flaws come to the fore, but as (or more)importantly, both sexes' attributes are on show, too, to boot. If the writer creates, equally, humorously offensive male and female characters, then it actually mirrors the real world while not playing partisan sexual politics. Do that and movie theatres will be swarming with women AND men, maybe like in days of old...like those when I, too, was young.

In "That Uncertain Feeling", good performances by the three lead actors give some life to a rather simplistic story. It is a mildly amusing movie, but there isn't enough to the plot or the script to make it any more than that.Melvyn Douglas and Merle Oberon play a married couple who seem to be reasonably content, but a chance meeting between the wife and an eccentric pianist (Burgess Meredith) suddenly threatens their whole marriage. Rather than choosing direct confrontation, the husband tries to use psychology to turn the situation in his favor, leading to some comic situations that only partially come off.The three leads are all pretty good, especially Meredith, who has the liveliest role. And Ernst Lubitsch directs with his usual dapper style. But there isn't really much of a story, and the behavior of the characters, while generally humorous, is too often completely implausible. So the movie is really never more than mildly entertaining.This will probably only be of particular interest to those who are fans of the director or one of the stars.