Undercurrent

The title is acknowledged before an artificial vista for the turbulence beneath the placid surface, "you can't always see it but it's there," so it goes with Vincente Minnelli's melodramas. The chemist's daughter (Katharine Hepburn) falls for a famed industrialist (Robert Taylor), a boiling test tube dissolves to the wedding ceremony. "The cash and the figure. Nice you got together." Adrift in a Washington party, rattling in the Virginia mansion, the "dowdy" bride remade into a chic socialite, the dream world swiftly darkening. The husband tenses up at the mention of the estranged brother, who's conjured up by Stevenson poems and Brahms pieces for the fascination of the inquisitive heroine. Eventually the specter is given Robert Mitchum's face, back to stir the murky past of neurosis and murder. "A sign of bad character, isn't it?" Gothic torment unsettles opulent gloss, "old-fashioned trust and blind faith" no longer paper over the bourgeois cracks. (The raving vagabond in the stables points up the Rebecca connection, and there's the Suspicion angle for the close-up of a sinister cup of coffee.) A San Francisco ranch, bare and luminous for one sibling and for the other full of swaying shadows. The casting runs strikingly against type—Hepburn at her most unguarded, the cruel strain of Taylor's handsome mask, Mitchum the thoughtful aesthete. A most abstruse picture of the war, Abel gets his gun overseas while on the homefront Cain makes his fortune by killing a German inventor. "Don't you ever go to the movies? It happens all the time." The fulminating stallion completes the equation, the terrorized woman's ride by the cliff's edge is unmistakably a rehearsal for the drives of The Bad and the Beautiful and Two Weeks in Another Town. With Edmund Gwenn, Marjorie Main, Jayne Meadows, Clinton Sundberg, Kathryn Card, and Leigh Whipper. In black and white.