The New Pictures, Mar. 31, 1941

That Uncertain Feeling (United Artists). For most cinemakers, jokes about psychoanalysts and their patients are as dated as sugar daddies. For cigar-faced Director Ernst Lubitsch, they can form the nucleus of a whole amusing movie about well-cushioned life with the upper crust. He proves it by sending Merle Oberon, a healthy Park Avenue socialite, to consult a Dr. Vengard (Alan Mowbray) at the beginning of the picture. When she tells him there is nothing wrong with her, he says: “I’m sure you will feel differently when you leave this office.” She does. Her happy marriage to a solidly normal insurance salesman (Melvyn Douglas) is disrupted by another of the doctor’s patients (Burgess Meredith), a zany pianist badly in need of a few treatments.

How Director Lubitsch manages to keep some fun in such an antique problem is still his own secret. There is his flawless sense of timing accentuated by his tricks with the Mickey Mouse technique of scoring. There is his poker-faced observation of the ridiculous. And there is his Svengalish knack of urging the utmost from his actors. For the first time in his movie career, Burgess Meredith is sufficiently subdued to be a funny comedian. For an advanced course in the sort of fluff & nonsense which has been the Lubitsch trademark, That Uncertain Feeling is a prerequisite.

That Hamilton Woman (United Artists). One of the spiciest scandals in British history occurred during the Napoleonic Wars: the romance of the great one-eyed, one-armed sea dog, Horatio, Lord Nelson (Laurence Olivier), and the frivolous Emma, Lady Hamilton (Vivien Leigh), wife of Britain’s Minister to the Court of Naples. Ostensibly, this British-bred, Hollywood-made film tries to tell it in epic tones. Actually, with the subtlety of a sock on the jaw, it is more concerned with informing U. S. cinemaudiences of the parallel between Britain’s struggle against Napoleonic tyranny and her current tangle with Hitler.

Grappling with history, this Alexander Korda production of an R. C. Sherriff-Walter Reisch screen play moves like the flow of molasses. Possibly because the narrative is a series of flashback recollections of Lady Hamilton, reclining in prison during her alcoholic dotage, its ponderous plodding can be attributed to the senility of the narrator. All Lady Hamilton offers in her two-hour tale is an extravagant picture of court finery, a romantic rehash of the exploits of the British fleet under Nelson, a fuzzy sketch of Nelson himself, a dazzling portrait of her own staggering beauty. There is no more feeling of life than in a billboard ad.

For anyone who left Gone With the Wind believing that Vivien Leigh was an accomplished actress, That Hamilton Woman will come as a nasty shock. While undemonstrative Husband Olivier mumbles his lines in his gullet or grimaces slightly to keep pace with his blind eye and scarred forehead. Miss Leigh changes the key completely by winking, pouting and fanning the air like a signalman. Her dramatic progress has left her only a gender’s distance from Mickey Rooney. The picture provides the sort of lethargic Mother Goose history which does not make movies, just monumental boredom.