Thomas Job’s Uncle Harry is a dark and intricate psychological play about how the mundane man can transform into the menacing. The play reflects a newly psychological approach to the type of crime drama that later came to be defined as Noir, a genre that although most often noted in film, was concurrently being developed on the stage. Uncle Harry enjoyed a popular 430 performance run on Broadway from 1942 to 1943 with a top-notch cast and was subsequently turned into a successful, albeit flawed, Universal Studios film. Additionally, throughout the 1940’s, the play proved to be a favorite amongst small semi-professional companies across the United States, from Waterloo, Iowa to Charleroi, Pennsylvania to Tucson, Arizona. Yet despite its initial success and it being an excellent example of the noir stage play, both Thomas Job and his Uncle Harry have found themselves almost completely forgotten in both the academic and professional theatre worlds after the 1950’s. Uncle Harry has never received a major revival and Thomas Job is barely mentioned in the published history of theatre except as an obscure footnote on noir drama.
Thomas Job was born in Camarthen, Wales in 1901, and moved the United States in the 1930’s to begin work on his Ph.D. in Dramatic Criticism at Yale University. Uncle Harry, along with most of Job’s other plays, was first envisioned, written, developed and performed with the faculty and students at Yale. It was from this highly collaborative academic environment that Job’s first professional theatrical success emerged, a stage adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s 19th Century satiric novel on church hypocrisy and lust, Barchester Towers, which premiered on Broadway in 1938. As Job’s professional career as a playwright developed, so did his career in academia. After finishing at Yale, he worked for a brief time as the head of the theatre department at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The academic environments that bracketed Job’s work as a playwright seemed to infuse his plays with an intellectual playfulness and a self-conscious psychology that offers a satiric edge to his dramatic plots. After the success of Uncle Harry, Job moved to California to pursue work as a screenwriter where he penned the disturbing study of illicit romance and mental illness, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, which starred Humphrey Bogart.
As the New York Times review of Uncle Harry pointed out, the play can be seen as part of a dark wave that swept Broadway during World War II. Running alongside Job’s play on Broadway was Joseph Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace and the Vincent Price vehicle, Angel Street, placing Uncle Harry squarely within the emerging noir genre on stage. Uncle Harry certainly contains some stylistic similarities with these works including a misanthropic take on society, a dark vision of the motives of man, a twisted portrayal of the byproducts of romance and an emphasis on the psychological aspects of deranged behavior. Yet, for all of these similarities, what distinguishes Uncle Harry is a clever toying with the audience’s expectations and assumptions. Some critics described Uncle Harry as a melodrama, but what they were missing was that Job was carefully tweaking the expectations of an audience long accustomed to melodrama, who would inevitably have watched the unfolding story with certain assumptions regarding character types and romance. Job skillfully references melodrama with plot devices like a family standing in the way of a love affair, and cleverly complicates and skews the motivations and actions that result from it, creating suspense out of psychology.
In addition to the surprising shifts and twists in the script for Uncle Harry, what added to the production’s success was its talented and experienced director Lem Ward, and its stars Eva Le Gallienne and Joseph Schildkraut. Director Lem Ward had previously directed the famous experimental Modernist production of Jonathan Howard Lawson’s Processional for the Theatre Guild, and the Living Newspaper, One Third of a Nation, for the Federal Theatre Project. Known for his elegant and artistic style, Ward would have lent a nuanced touch to Uncle Harry. Le Gallienne was a noted actress, producer and director, with a long production history both in the commercial theatre and at the Civic Repertory Theatre that she founded in the 1930’s. Le Gallienne was famed for her portrayal of canonical characters from Ibsen and Chekhov and for her commitment to staging classical European texts in New York. Schildkraut was a celebrated actor in his own right, both on stage and screen, who had recently won acclaim for his starring roles in Ferenc Molnar’s Lliom and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.
The success of Uncle Harry on stage was not, sad to say, transferred to its film adaptation. As the play closed on Broadway, the New York Times published an article saying that plans for a film directed by the great German director Fritz Lang were in the works, starring the original Broadway cast. This plan was not, however, to come to fruition, and the film version was ultimately directed by the lesser-known German expatriate director Robert Siodmak starring George Sanders and Geraldine Fitzgerald. Additionally, the studio became concerned over the moral ambiguity at the end of the play and chose to use an unlikely and clunky ending wherein Harry awakens at the end of the film to discover that it has all been a dream.
It is perhaps because of this unfortunate film adaptation, coupled with Thomas Job’s untimely death at the age of 45, that Uncle Harry has been lost in the recesses of the American canon. For TACT, this unusually smart crime drama is a perfect match for the Salon Series theme of “A Fine Romance,” showing us a tweaked and twisted vision of love and introducing many audience members for the first time to the work of this fascinating, though neglected writer.
