Friday, February 28, 2025
Film review: How to Murder a Rich Uncle (1957)
We were inspired to watch this one (in a rather poor print on YouTube) because it was Katie Johnson's follow up (and last film) to The Ladykillers. It was...okay. It has the droll attitude to serial murder that Kind Hearts and Coronets does but far less of the charm. That's not to say that it doesn't have its virtues: everyone in it acquits themselves well, and it's competently directed, but once they start bumping off characters who seem perfectly harmless, and rather young, it leaves a little sour taste in the mouth. The basic premise is that a family living in a crumbling stately home, on which a huge tax bill is due in a month, welcome a rich uncle who grew up in that house but left to find his fortune in America, and try to bump him off to get his money. But they (well, the head of the family, played by Nigel Patrick)
just manage to kill of successive members of the family, starting with his own sister, then his mother, and then his own son, at which point I started to wonder what the point of saving the house was. The sang froid that follows each successive funeral is, I suppose, meant humorously to evoke the English stiff upper lip (even thought the screenplay is based on a French play) but it comes across as almost psychopathic. Katie Johnson is the most sympathetic figure, as she plays an aunt who also grew up in the house, and turns out to be the only one who knows about a secret system of passageways that allow her to overhear the father's plans and help to protect the uncle (also sympathetic, and played by the ever-reliable Charles Coburn).
Unfortunately this contributes to the deaths of family members, as, for example, it is the family matriarch (played by a seriously underused Wendy Hiller)
who falls to her death because of a sabotaged stair. At least the daughter of the family survives, perhaps because, unlike the son, she was not let in on the plot. Her wet boyfriend (whom she accuses of being "virginal" because he rebuffs her advances),
however, who fancies himself a criminologist, thinks he has worked out that it is the uncle bumping off the family so that he can gain the prestige that all his dollars cannot buy. Will Katie Johnson's Alice be able to clear Uncle George? You can probably guess. Oh, and Michael Caine is in it, playing a hulking gardener, whose only word seems to be "aye," a fact mocked in a strange coda, where the dead family members appear as ghosts and are introduced by the actors' real names.
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