TIME

August 12, 1966 12:00 AM GMT-4

The Uncle. Boys will be boys wherever they grow, so it must have seemed quite feasible to coax a thin-skinned British movie from Margaret Abrams’ young-in-heart novel about a seven-year-old Texan named Gus. Transported to an English setting and played with luminous sensitivity by young Robert Duncan, who has the face of a Dickensian waif, Gus hotly resents the presence of Tom, a nephew his own age. He cannot understand why his Mum and Dad are Tom’s grandparents, why his own father is sluggish and old while Tom’s is the roughhousing playmate who married Sister. But then, why do birds fly, why are babies born at all, and why does the dour old shopkeeper Mr. Ream, Gus’s best friend, have to get sick and die?

Director Desmond Davis (The Girl with Green Eyes), a former movie cameraman, relates The Uncle as a poetic photographic essay, and the mysteries of life, death, birth, love and childhood never seem terribly urgent to him. Wondering young eyes peer through a windowpane glazed with rain. The boy heads home with a budgie in a cage, the sympathetic camera charting every hop, skip and jump through reflections in puddles along the way. The movie too often patronizes Gus, at times filming in squat position to suggest the size and shape of experience from a lad’s point of view. Unfortunately, getting down on one’s knees is apt to reveal more about creaky adult sentimentality than about the quick pains of childhood. Director Davis disowns the version of the movie now showing in the U.S. as a poorly edited rehash of his original work, but evidence remains that Gus’s avuncular tale, though picture-pretty, was always a bit of a muddle.

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