D Gary Grady

There’s so much stuffed into this movie that Peter Jackson would probably have turned the same material into six or seven of them, but to the credit of Joss Whedon and company it’s reasonably coherent. I confess I kept figuring out bits and pieces of it long after watching it, and I’m still not clear on who everybody was. (It would help if I still read comics.) I’d probably like it more on a second viewing, as with Cloud Atlas.

Hawkeye, the bow-and-arrow guy, finally gets some actual screen time and character development. He turns out to have a secret life that among other things involves obsessively remodeling his house.
We also get more insight into Bruce Banner (the Hulk when he’s at home) and his complicated relationship with the Black Widow, who has some quite touching scenes that left me and doubtless a lot of other viewers wanting to comfort her, and not merely because she’s played by Scarlett Johansson.

In fact, Johansson wasn’t the only person playing the Black Widow. Since she was pregnant during filming, a number of stunt doubles were hired, and according to Chris Evans (Thor), they looked so much like her that he kept starting conversations with Johansson only to realize that he was talking to one of her doubles. Apparently LA has a considerable stock of Scarlett Johansson clones, which is one of the most thought-provoking bits of news I’ve ever heard this year.

The most interesting new characters are a super-powered brother and sister played by Elizabeth Olsen (younger sister of Mary-Kate and Ashley) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (the high school student who turned himself into a superhero of sorts in 2010’s Kick-Ass). Olsen and Taylor-Johnson are good friends in real life, having played a married couple in the 2014 version of Godzilla.

James Spader plays Ultron, an artificial intelligence who occupies a series of robot bodies, most of them eight or nine feet tall. The bodies are computer-generated images, but Spader did more than just supply the voice. He acted on-set, and motion-capture was used to make that the basis for the computer imagery.

As an aid to the other actors interacting with him, he wore a rig resembling insect antennae with red balls at the top where his eyes would be in the final film. Elizabeth Olsen said that Spader’s performance was so good that she kept forgetting herself and looking at his actual face rather than where the character’s face would be in the final film. Her friend Taylor-Johnson would helpfully remind her what she was supposed to be doing by yelling, “Red balls! Look at his balls, Lizzie!”

(My guess is that other actors had a roughly parallel problem in scenes involving the Black Widow.)

Ultron was originally meant to create world peace, but after five minutes on the Internet he decides that doing this requires getting rid of all humans.

Stan Lee’s cameo is as a World War II veteran. Lee actually did join the Army, but he never saw combat, instead spending some of his time writing training materials and films and even creating an anti-VD poster. A popular rumor has it that Lee wrote posters that were illustrated by Theodore Geisel (better known as Dr Seuss), but I can’t find confirmation of this, though Geisel was also employed by the Army as a writer and illustrator.

Speaking of trivia, skimming through IMDb’s trivia section on the film I ran across a somewhat cryptic item reading, “During the Iron Man/Hulk fight, the Hulk was originally going to turn grey,” which I initially misread as “turn gay.”

While I didn’t like the film quite as much as I did the first Avengers movie, I recommend it, and it reminded me why I find Marvel more appealing than DC. Near the end, the good guys are trying to save the inhabitants of an Eastern European city facing obliteration. When one of them says he’s not leaving until the civilians are safe, I believed him, and not because he’s a comic book hero but because I understood why his character would feel that way.

Contrast this with, say, Man of Steel, in which Superman does a lot of heroic things but the film and the characters treat the mass slaughter of unnamed residents of Metropolis as little more than passing collateral damage.

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There are a number of movies (mainly in the horror genre) with the same name (such as the 2008 film reviewed here), but as far as I can tell they’re unrelated except for the title. In this one, an English composer and his sister (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) come upon an empty but spacious and appealing seaside house while traveling in Devonshire, and on an impulse they decide to buy it and move in. The owner lives nearby with his grown granddaughter Stella (Gail Russell), who doesn’t want the house to be sold because she had lived there the first three years of her life, up until her mother’s tragic death, and she doesn’t want to lose that link.

Milland and Hussey are sympathetic and after they buy the house they invite her to visit whenever she likes. She proves so appealing that Milland soon finds himself falling in love with her. One day he plays a lovely romantic ballad on the piano and she’s surprised and touched to learn that he wrote it for her, calling it “Stella by Starlight.”

(It was actually written by the film’s composer, Victor Young, and it later became an enduring piece of popular music, especially after it was released with a lyric by Ned Washington in 1946. You can find many versions on YouTube.)

The house proves to be haunted, perhaps by more than one spirit. News of this provokes a strange reaction in Stella’s grandfather, who sends her away to a rest home owned by a strangely menacing woman.

The rest home owner is very well played by Cornelia Otis Skinner, who was at least as well known as an author of books, plays (some of which she also starred in), and a long series of popular humor pieces for The New Yorker. Skinner and her friend Emily Kimbrough wrote a best-selling book about their college trip through Europe called Our Hearts Were Young and Gay that was adapted into a movie.

The Uninvited is a pretty decent ghost story with some nice twists, and I liked it. It’s sometimes said that the 1963 film Charade (starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn) was the best Hitchcock film not directed by Hitchcock, and this movie, while not that good, might be a runner up in the same category. Two of its actors also worked with Hitchcock, most obviously Ray Milland, who starred in Dial M for Murder, but also Alan Napier (the village doctor in this film) who was in at least one episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series (and is today probably most remembered for playing Batman’s butler Alfred).

Despite the English setting, The Uninvited was shot in California, Britain being rather occupied with World War II at the time.

Incidentally, later the same year Gail Russell (Stella) starred as Cornelia Otis Skinner in the film adaptation of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, and she appeared in its 1946 sequel as well. In other films she played opposite such major stars as Joel McCrea, Alan Ladd, and John Wayne.

She was beautiful and a pretty decent actress, but she was so shy and unsure of herself that she turned to alcohol to steady her nerves eventually developing a serious drinking problem that damaged her career. One night in 1961, not long after appearing in her first film in three years, she telephoned a radio station to request “Stella by Starlight.” The following day she was found dead in her small studio apartment surrounded by empty liquor bottles. She was 36.

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Teresa Wright plays a young woman of about 18 who lives with her parents and much younger brother and sister in Santa Rosa, a small all-American city in northern California. She’s rather bored until her mother’s beloved younger brother, Joseph Cotten, comes for an extended stay.

Wright has always liked her charming and widely-traveled uncle, but gradually she develops suspicions about him, darkly serious suspicions supported by concrete evidence that she dare not talk about with anyone for fear that if they prove true, the news would destroy her mother.

Tension builds slowly but becomes intense, not least because Wright’s character is so likable and her situation so difficult and eventually very dangerous. As for Cotten, I can’t think of another Hitchcock film that so deeply examines one of its characters and the underlying reasons for his actions.

Teresa Wright was unique in having been nominated for an Academy Award in each of her first three films. She won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as the granddaughter in Mrs Miniver and in this film, her fourth, had top billing over Joseph Cotten. Her acting career lasted until 1997, and she died in 2005.

Her father, a mild-mannered bank employee, is played by Henry Travers, best known for his role as Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life. Hume Cronyn (made up to look older than he really was at the time) is the father’s eccentric best friend.

According to a documentary about the film, it was Cronyn’s first screen role, and he said that during production in Santa Rosa a little girl ran up to him to get his autograph, the very first he’d ever been asked for. When returned her autograph book she examined at his signature, then looked up and him and commanded, “Hurry up and get famous!”

The heroine’s younger sister is a similarly no-nonsense little girl played by Edna May Wonacott, the real-life daughter of a Santa Rosa grocer. Hitchcock had noticed her waiting at a bus stop when he was scouting locations and thought she had the perfect studious look for the part. She had no acting experience, not even in a school play, and her only training was a bit of coaching by Hitchcock’s daughter Patricia, but she’s quite good and went on to play similar parts in a few other films over the course of a decade.

The heroine’s best friend (the one who casts a rather predatory leer on Joseph Cotten when they’re introduced) was another Santa Rosa resident named Estelle Jewell. Other minor characters were played by locals as well.

The mother, Joseph Cotten’s sister, is played by Patricia Collinge, an Irish-born actress whom Teresa Wright had previously worked with in The Little Foxes. Macdonald Carey is an undercover policed detective investigating Cotten who develops an attraction to the heroine.

Wright wasn’t happy with a scene in the script that had Carey confess his romantic feelings to her because she thought they way it played out wasn’t believable, so she sought Collinge’s opinion and found she agreed with her. Wright took this up with Hitchcock and suggested he let Collinge — a successful short-story author as well as an actor — rewrite the scene, and he accepted her advice. (In fact, Hitchcock often welcomed ideas from the cast and crew, as did Orson Welles. So much for the notion of the director as auteur.) He liked Collinge’s help enough that he later brought her in as a script doctor on Lifeboat.

The story for Shadow of a Doubt was proposed by Gordon McDonell. The script was by Thornton Wilder (best known of course for his play Our Town) with revisions by Sally Benson and by Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, as well as by Collinge, though Collinge received no on-screen writing credit.

Another amusing tidbit from the documentary: During a break in production the cast and crew organized a gin rummy tournament and invited Hitchcock to participate. He said he didn’t know the game but would play if someone would teach him how. Someone did, and Hitchcock won the tournament. I suspect this inspired his cameo in the film as a card player.

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