Mitchell Leisen’s final film for Paramount, conceived as a derivative project meant to exploit a licensed play (by James M. Barrie) and the still-standing sets of William Wyler’s The Heiress, could sound like a typically dispiriting final act at the end of one of Hollywood’s longest and most rewarding director-studio collaborations. It is, in fact, one of Leisen’s most brilliantly conceptual films – a comedy of manners in which Leisen asks what would happen if the parent-child relationship were reset and one had to get to know one’s family from scratch at a later stage in life. The result is delicately embarrassing, hilarious, and touching – sometimes all three at once. Like its title, somebody is upset, but we never fully understand who or why. Upset passes from one family member to another like a virus. After years of working in Panama, a couple played by Joan Fontaine and John Lund return to the United States and to the children who were raised in their absence. Victorian values on their last legs and the delightfully goofy Fontaine is emotionally out of step, unaware that she has returned to an altogether new age. At the beginning of the film, their teenage daughter Amy (Mona Freeman) sneaks into a theatre and watches one of those plays filled with too many French words. The kitschy production makes her feel worldly and newly exposed to the “seedy side of life” – to sex. The dewy-eyed Amy develops eccentricities and neurotic attitudes toward parents she barely knows. She projects the play onto real life, presuming her mother to be unfaithful while delivering lines that somehow slipped under the Breen Office’s radar. She says, “Tonight, I might be compromised,” fantasising about losing her virginity in a quixotic attempt to save her mother from notoriety. There is not one single misunderstanding but a cascade of them at every turn. Nearly every sentence remains half-delivered, automatically becoming wittily suggestive.

Ehsan Khoshbakht