Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786302208948
Format: Black & White
ISBN: 6302208947
Label: MGM (Warner)
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: MGM (Warner)
Release Date: 1998-09-01
Running Time: 116
Studio: MGM (Warner)
Theatrical Release Date: 1946-11-28

Customer Rating:
Summary: Katharine Hepburn in a Joan Fontaine role???
Comment: The first thing that came to my mind as I was watching this movie was "How in the world did Katharine Hepburn get this role?" She did a great job, as usual, but this was definitely a Joan Fontaine role. Joan Fontaine shines in this type of movie. Katharine Hepburn just fits so much better in her roles as a strong, independent woman, than a scared (supposedly) and timid young woman.
Katharine Hepburn plays Ann Sheridan, the smart daughter of a scientist (this part actually reminded me of some of her other roles), who falls in love with Robert Taylor. The two of them get married, and she realizes he is not the man she thought he was. He has an extreme hatred for his brother (Robert Mitchum), whom she has never met. Surprising climax.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: There was a taut B-movie noir struggling to get out, but it died trying because of overwrought directing and acting
Comment: Take a few dark and stormy nights, fog coming in from the coast, obsession and doubt, two brothers who have a mysterious connection based on hatred, a suspicious disappearance, a shoe in the night silently grinding out a glowing cigarette butt, and, finally, a tremulous heroine who finds herself threatened as much by her own doubts as by one -- but which one? -- of the men around her. Sounds like we might have a good 80 minute noir. Instead, under the direction of Vincente Minnelli and with two A-list leads, Katharine Hepburn and Robert Taylor, Undercurrent becomes a nearly two-hour matinee melodrama, a long slog of threatening angst amidst the perfectly groomed, coifed and dressed cast. When you glance at your watch half-way through a movie and with a sinking heart see that you have another hour to go, both you and the movie probably have problems.

Minnelli, in one of his earliest non-musical movies, doesn't lay on the rococo hothouse approach as heavily as he later was known to do. Still, what is basically a simple story of greed, murder and obsession is turned into an endless Katharine Hepburn vehicle. Hepburn shows us in carefully lit close-ups how to demonstrate fear, love, anxiety, giddiness, happiness, doubt, suspicion and terror. Robert Taylor is more or less along for the ride.

Hepburn starts the movie as the tomboyish Ann Hamilton, an energetic young woman in slacks who helps her father with his inventions. Their housekeeper is determined to get her married. When Dr. Hamilton decides to sell an important formula to Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor), it's love at first sight. Garroway is the smooth, handsome, dynamic inventor of the Garroway Distance Controller, which was vital in the war, and which has turned him into a hard-charging millionaire manufacturer. He's a captain of industry, as one of his many Washington friends says. Ann Hamilton, now Ann Garroway, may still be a bit of the tomboy, but her husband shows her how to dress and how to be a successful social hostess for all those Congressmen and judges her husband knows. She learns fast and eagerly. They both are obviously and blissfully in love.

But wait. The canker is about to gnaw. Ann realizes she knows nothing about her husband's family. None of his employees or friends seem inclined to talk about them to her. When she learns bit by bit that Alan's mother died in the old family home in Middleburg while seated at the piano, or that he has a brother, Michael, who has disappeared, Alan becomes very quiet...and sometimes goes into a rage. He always apologizes. But wait once more. Did his mother really play the piano? Didn't she really die in bed? Wasn't Michael caught taking money from the family firm and Alan sent him away? All this plays out against the exquisite hotel suites, the manicured country home in Middleburg with the horse stable and the tasteful ranch house by the sea. Everyone in the movie except employees are dressed to the nines. There are exclusive cocktail parties and intimate dinners for twenty. Even in a black-and-white movie, Minnelli can't help but give us dining tables filled with crystal and china, tasteful and elegant furniture and lots of gowns.

By the end of the movie, when all is finally known, when Ann on horseback is chased along a high, extremely well-designed mountain trail by the bad guy on another horse, when she is threatened with death by boulder and her pursuer finally meets death by horse, it's a relief. Even Robert Mitchum, who plays Michael, is unable to bring much tension to the movie. What might have been in lesser hands a taut little B-movie, instead with the A list is just an overwrought melodrama, too big for its bones.

Undercurrent is part of the DVD package, The Katharine Hepburn Collection. It can also be tracked down separately on VHS. It's worth watching once as a lesson in how a small, good idea can be ruined by too much of just about everything.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Film Noir Psychological Thriller..!
Comment: This movie starts out slowly but builds as things just don't seem right in the Garroway family. The movie will hold your attention as the story builds to a climax with "the truth" finally revealed at the end. Robert Taylor plays the brother of Mitchum and the husband of Hepburn. He is hiding a secret and is not what he seems. One of my favorite thrillers.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Surprising
Comment: I thoroughly enjoyed this film. While it was a departure for Ms. Hepburn, it was intriguing to see her go through the ups and downs as a damsel in distress, if for no other reason than to see her do something against type. Since I'm used to seeing her in strong female roles, it was interesting to see her play someone who was a victim. The whole cast did a great job. Of course, I wasn't looking for the film to be flawed, I was expecting to enjoy it. Maybe that's the difference between me and those who didn't like the film.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: What were they thinking?
Comment: In one of the few times she ever played a genuinely frightened person in her entire life, Katharine Hepburn stars in this silly but very expensive melodrama from MGM. The dowdy daughter of a New England university chemistry professor (who keeps his laboratory, which she also uses, adjoining the family dining room), she is wooed by millionaire manufacturer Robert Taylor, who whisks her off to his Georgetown mansion to introduce her to Washington high society and dress her according to his supposedly exquisite taste in women's clothing. (The outfits, by Irene, are so horribly unflattering on Hepburn they seem almost perversely chosen.) In DC, Hepburn learns never to mention Taylor's absent brother, whose very mention seems to produce fits of twitching and nostril-flaring in her new husband; this meassage becomes hammered home even further when they visit Taylor's childhood home, a plush estate in Virginia horse country. Then there are further steps along the way in San Francisco and the California countryside, with even one scene set in a Seattle board room, and a special guest appearance by Robert Mitchum before we're back to the ominous mansion in Virginia with NO TELEPHONES (as the characters repeatedly remind us) before Taylor really goes off his nut.

Why this film had to be so expansive and cover so many states is an even bigger mystery than what happened to Taylor's brother. So too is the reason why MGM chose Katharine Hepburn, of all people, to play the kind of role usually accorded Joan Fontaine: although Hepburn is quite charming in the final scenes where she's required to be terrified, she seems to be playing an entirely different person altogether than in the beginning when she does her usual schtick as a father-adoring Yankee tomboy. The film seems to go on forever because there are so many little loose ends that have to be drawn together at the very end; even so, the film's storyline gives the impression of having been made up as it goes along. The only real reasons to see this, other than for campiness, are the stunning interiors by Cedric Gibbons and the beautiful lighting and cinematography (the latter by Karl Freund) which seem wasted on all the melodramatic silliness.

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