Joel McCrea needs a new governess since they all don't want to stay very long, like also the cooks and the maids, since there are strange goings-on in the house next door, which is all closed up and derelict after a murder committed there many years ago; but Joel's two children, who the governess is for, have some interest in the fishy business, the boy even getting rewarded for letting an unknown stranger into the house at night. Gail Russell as the poor young innocent governess doesn't quite know which way to turn, as she gets more and more involved in a mysterious unpleasantness, but Herbert Marshall is a doctor a few houses away who seems to be a safe terminal; while the sour Joel McCrea is constantly out of his humour, stingy and difficult. The governess with the two children gives you immediate associations to Henry James "The Turn of the Screw", but this is actually no ghost story and nothing like that. It's a logical criminal mystery, which could have been made more of, but as it is it's at least good and interesting entertainment.
Review of The Unseen
