Undercurrent (1946)

Undercurrent is a prime example of gay director Minnelli’s critique of American marriage as a stunting reduction of manhood. 

(As I recall, Robin Wood established this theme primarily in Minnelli’s comedies — e.g., Father of the Bride, Meet Me In St Louis, The Long Long Trailer, etc. — and may or may not have examined it in this melodrama. It’s decades since I read his work and my library is, alas, too long gone for me to check. So I may be reseeding Robin’s field.)  

Katherine Hepburn’s Ann is a spinsterish independent with no time for the conventional woman’s compulsive search for a husband. She’s content to work for her professor father in his home chemistry lab.  

Her father (Edmund Gwenn) is a cuddly, wise, loving man, as handy at the piano as at the test tubes, but he is utterly desexualized by his widowhood and name. She calls him Dinks! Her one suitor is a more paradoxically named prof, the boyish vapid Joseph Bangs (he doesn’t). 

Against that backdrop of male impotence stand the powerful two Garroway brothers. Ann is instantly awed by Alan (Robert Taylor), the slick operator who made his fortune on a long-distance control device he supposedly invented in time to win WW II. 

But his reputation and character are both false. He killed the German scientist whose device he then stole. In another manipulation to show his power, Alan lets his new wife Ann embarrass herself in a dowdy dress at a reception for his flashy friends. That’s to get their admiration for his ensuing remake. 

Only after marrying Alan does she hear he has a brother Michael (Robert Mitchum). Alan describes Michael as the family black sheep who robbed him to fund his wastrel life, then disappeared. The more he avoids discussing him the more Ann becomes intrigued by him.  

     The two brothers recall the two additives Dinks dropped into the test tube to demonstrate the irreversible effects of love on a placid element. The tube (Ann) bubbleth over.

Of course Taylor and Mitchum were box office and romance studs. Taylor was the pretty boy, Mitchum the seething danger. Their personae work here. This time it’s the pretty boy who proves the murderous threat, the ostensible Bad Boy the hero.

Ann becomes intrigued by what she hears about the mysteriously disappeared Michael. When she collects his rebound book of poems she finds a kindred spirit she initially thinks is her Alan — which ignites his anger and fear. When she visits Michael’s ranch (now Alan’s), she finds Michael’s “home” profoundly more comforting than Alan’s. To mislead her, Alan claims his mother, not Michael, played the Brahms she loves — and he hates. That music becomes the signature of Michael’s return and their union.  

Both brothers are “undercurrents,” Michael in his sensitive, creative and principled character, Alan by his willingness to kill. 

The film’s major “undercurrent” is the irony that Ann married a fake but thereby finds her true love. She finds it by going beyond the structure — and strictures — of her marriage. The sensitive idealist and firmly individualistic man has no space in this film’s institution of marriage.   As the parties reveal, this world is gaudily artificial and ritualized, a glib dance of power. Where seat the judge?
Michael spurned Sylvia’s love because he met her through Alan and couldn’t undermine him. So, too, he later suppresses his attraction to Ann. 

Michael disappeared because he couldn’t bear the burden of bis brother’s guilt — nor to betray him. He hoped the war would end his dilemma but he survived. Meeting Ann rouses him to confront him to save her. As nature overrules man’s fragile and arbitrary social constructions, the wild horse stops Alan’s attack on Ann and the truly civilized outsider Michael fulfills her. Notably, the film doesn't end on a marriage but upon an extra-institutional harmony, the lovers joined in their Brahms.