That Uncertain Feeling

A couple of nights ago I watched Ernst Lubitsch's 1941 marital comedy That Uncertain Feeling, With Merle Oberon, Melvyn Douglas, and Burgess Meredith. Lubitsch is my favorite director of the American studio era, and I wouldn't say anyone else is close. That Uncertain Feeling and Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938) are very often thought of as the least of the films he made in the prime of his U.S. sound period, roughly the stretch between Trouble in Paradise (1932) and Heaven Can Wait (1943). (Yes, I love the early Chevalier musicals almost without reservation, but it's more conventional to begin with the masterpiece T in P.) I've generally agreed with that assessment, but I wasn't positive I'd ever watched TUF all the way through in one sitting. When it appeared on the TCM schedule I decided to give it that courtesy.

First of all I should clarify that to me, a bad Ernst Lubitsch film can still approach true excellence by any other standard. I confess that I think of To Be or Not to Be in this way; no matter how I try, I can't think of that film's slapstick treatment of Nazi occupation - usually regarded as its unlikely triumph - as anything less than inappropriate, a rare instance of atonality more typical of the most heartless excesses of Lubitsch's protege, Billy Wilder. But To Be or Not to Be is still very funny, sometimes thrillingly so, despite the flaw at its center, which probably goes a long way toward accounting for its strong reputation. That Uncertain Feeling is not, and the reasons why are the reasons it doesn't succeed as a film.

More than a comedy of marriage, it's a comedy of remarriage. But unlike, for instance, Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth, the canonical example of this subset, there's little comedy in the breakup. The marriage at stake here isn't disrupted by an inconvenient uncovering of the farcically blithe mutual unfaithfulness of the couple, but rather by one partner's recognition of the fact that the other has begun to take her entirely for granted, and that their relationship is no longer interesting on any meaningful level. It's a situation that's all the more convincing for its banality, and it makes the straying of Merle Oberon's character into the arms of curmudgeonly pianist Burgess Meredith seem more sadly inevitable than disastrously rash.

It isn't funny because it's true; Lubitsch is too observant of the pitfalls of marriage. We certainly don't want to see Oberon with the dull, conceited pseudo-intellectual Meredith, but neither do we have any reason to hope she'll return to Douglas; she's probably right to leave him and when they do reunite it feels like they're both embracing a life of complacency and ennui. One could argue that this is the point: that Lubitsch wasn't trying to make one of his famously urbane, discreetly broadminded comedies at all, but rather a resigned, if not cynical, statement on the utterly pervasive compromise necessary to sustain a "successful" bourgeois marriage. This proposition is supported by the genuinely strange mise-en-scene of the domestic setting - Douglas and Oberon's Park Avenue apartment is a place of constant, dappled shadows, its shifting half-light contributing more than subtly to the general atmosphere of discomfort, uncertainty, and unease.

Maybe that's part of it - with films like Ninotchka and The Shop Around the Corner, Lubitsch had already shown himself possessed of an earnestness far beyond the coy but delighting amorality of the Chevalier musicals, Trouble in Paradise, and Design for Living - warm and generous though they were. But That Uncertain Feeling also suffers from what may have been the least appealing cast in any of Lubitsch's sound comedies. Meredith's stiff, mannered performance more suggests pathetic maladjustment than keen iconoclasm or misanthropy. And the famed Lubitsch effervescence is effectively flattened by the total lack of chemistry between Oberon, whose coldly radiant victimhood is better suited to high (camp) melodrama, and the priggish, self-satisfied Douglas, who for his part nearly sank the otherwise exquisite Ninotchka. Perhaps, hidden within what admittedly strikes me as a bluntly demoralizing script (by the redoubtable Donald Ogden Stewart), there is a sublime comedy that could have been released by the likes of, say, Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, and Ralph Bellamy. In that case, assuming the director was doing his best with the group at hand, it would be difficult to blame him for the fall of this particular souffle.