EDWARD, MY SON (1949)

Unsatisfying, but intriguing, Robert Morley’s second-drawer prestige play (a hit in London & on B’way) has aged in happy & unhappy ways. Losing the satiric edge of Morley’s distinctive acting style as leading man in its transfer from stage to screen, the infernal rise of Spencer Tracy, now in the role of corrupt capitalist, from bankrupt insurance fraud to knighted publisher/entrepreneur, can’t quite support itself as serious drama, yet keeps you involved wondering just how low this man will go. Edward, the son in question, is never seen (the play’s big gimmick), yet drives the action via Tracy’s law-skirting ambition, threats of blackmail & financial double-dealing, all done to enable the boy’s path to success. A horror story of scale-tipping entitlement that sees wife Deborah Kerr sink into middle-age alcoholism, run over, like everyone else (business partners, teachers, mistress, personal physician) to gain the bratty scapegrace advantage by any means. A disappointment on release, other than Kerr’s Oscar® nom’d perf, which now looks rather overcooked. (On stage, Peggy Ashcroft, a decade & a half older, and off the screen from ‘41 to ‘59, must have been perfect.) While Tracy, who was panned at the time, now looks caustically honest as a monster of self-justifying ethical lapses. There’s still a shock to his work, if none of the sly wit Morley presumably brought.* You get a taste of how it all might have come together in a long scene between Tracy and mistress Leueen MacGrath (a holdover, along with Ian Hunter, from the stage cast). Discovering a private dick outside her apartment, the couple turn tables on the guy and invite him in. A very neat, and neatly played scene. (Straight from the play?) More like this and the film might be more than an intriguing miss.

DOUBLE-BILL/SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Tracy played just this sort of amoral success in the famous, if overrated, THE POWER AND GLORY/’33, an early, rather pretentious script from the young Preston Sturges, stolidly directed by the talented, if uneven, William K. Howard. OR: You can almost certainly get an idea of Morley in the lead watching him play G. B. Shaw’s military industrialist Undershaft in MAJOR BARBARA/‘41.