Ida Lupino (1953)
Ida Lupino became the first woman in the sound era to direct herself in a mainstream American movie when she made The Bigamist. This was her sixth feature in four years but Lupino didn’t direct another film for more than a decade and her next one, The Trouble with Angels (1966), would be her last. Although she kept busy until the late 1970s directing television, as well as acting in films and TV, The Bigamist’s merits are cause for real regret that Lupino wasn’t able to continue her career as a cinema director.
Harry Graham (Edmond O’Brien) and his wife Eve (Joan Fontaine) live in San Francisco though Harry is often working at the Los Angeles office of the home freezer business that the couple owns. The Grahams are childless – Eve is infertile – and they want to adopt a child. In the opening scene they’re interviewed at an adoption agency by a Mr Jordan (Edmund Gwenn), who tells them that, as a matter of procedure, he needs to investigate their background and current circumstances. That sparks an instant worried look from Harry and instant suspicion on the part of Jordan: the husband’s evident discomfort is in sharp contrast to his wife’s smiling eagerness for the adoption process to be completed as speedily as possible. A determined sleuth, Jordan visits Los Angeles but can find no record of Harry as a guest in the local hotels where he supposedly stays. He finds a ‘Harrison Graham’ listed in the LA phone directory and calls at the relevant address. Harry answers the door; Jordan has hardly got inside before he hears a baby crying. Harry admits this is his child and that he is married to the baby’s mother. With the appalled adoption agent about to phone the police, Harry begs for a chance to explain the situation that made him a bigamist. Jordan reluctantly agrees to listen.
The Bigamist gets off to a pedestrian start: Harry’s telegraphed furtive behaviour at the interview leads into a bit of laboured comedy, involving Jane Darwell as the nosey office cleaner who interrupts Jordan’s attempts to impart his first impressions of the Grahams to a Dictaphone. The extended flashback that represents Harry’s explanation to Jordan and occupies most of the film’s eighty minutes makes for a slightly lumpy structure. Nearly every individual scene that the flashback comprises is strong in itself, though, and Ida Lupino’s approach to all three of her principals – the husband and his two wives – is sympathetic and nuanced. Harry has broken the law and betrayed both Eve and Phyllis Martin (Lupino), who becomes the second Mrs Graham: neither woman knows of the other’s existence. Yet The Bigamist isn’t sensationalist or censorious. Harry may have done wrong but not because he’s a bad man. Things just happened that way.
The performances are excellent. Lupino clearly liked working with Edmond O’Brien, who had also starred in her previous film, The Hitch-Hiker (released earlier in 1953). In his late thirties at the time, O’Brien was definitely a character actor rather than a matinee idol: for a while here, you may be baffled as to how he’s managed to attract Joan Fontaine or Ida Lupino. But O’Brien’s doughy, ordinary appearance pays increasing dividends and expresses convincingly Harry’s combination of neediness and somewhat weak will (though he does try for as long as he can to keep his friendship with Phyllis platonic). At first, Joan Fontaine’s Eve seems an ideal wife – beautiful, brainy yet supportive – but you gradually see how her witty efficiency could pall. It’s this quality, rather than Eve’s inability to bear children, that puts distance – emotional as well as geographical – between Harry and her.
A particularly fine sequence sees the Grahams playing host to the couple’s lawyer (Kenneth Tobey) and a senior business contact called Forbes (James Todd). Eve sparkles not just socially but in her charming display of technical knowledge of the workings of freezers. ‘Why didn’t you ever send your wife in to sell to me?’ Forbes asks Harry, ‘she packs quite a punch’. ‘Haven’t you heard? Eve’s the brains, I’m the brawn,’ Harry replies. Eve then insists she’s ‘just Harry’s little secretary, trying to get along’. You’re left in no doubt which one of the couple is indulging in false modesty. Yet Fontaine isn’t so cool as to exclude audience sympathy with Eve and what she’s bound in due course to learn about her husband. Ida Lupino’s Phyllis is impressively complex. In one of their early conversations, Phyl, a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, tells Harry about her lost love, an American soldier with the occupation forces in Germany who sent her a ‘Dear Phyllis’ letter (‘I lost out to a little Fräulein’). Next to the immaculate Eve, Phyl is relatively earthy but Lupino, without self-admiration, gives this unsentimental lonelyheart a poignant vulnerability. In the hands of the reliable Edmund Gwenn, Mr Jordan’s strenuous diligence feels authentic.
The Bigamist has plenty of real-life marital and movie references. Collier Young, who wrote the screenplay, and Ida Lupino divorced in 1951; the following year, Young married Joan Fontaine. Salesman Harry Graham falls for a woman who shares a forename with the Barbara Stanwyck character that led a different kind of salesman astray in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944). Harry and Phyllis first meet on a Beverly Hills bus tour that takes in the homes of Hollywood stars including Stanwyck and Edmund Gwenn (there’s even mention of Miracle on 34th Street (1947), which gave Gwenn his best-known role and landed him an Oscar). These self-references aren’t smug, though, and they don’t limit the film’s serious dramatic purpose. Some serve to point up differences between The Bigamist and its referents that puncture notions of a juicy movie à clef. After her divorce from Young and his marriage to Fontaine, Lupino remained friends with them both. Unlike Stanwyck’s Phyllis Didrikson, Phyllis Martin is decidedly not a femme fatale.
Ida Lupino had also broken new ground in The Hitch-Hiker as the first female director of a film noir. The result was a tense thriller and no mean achievement but The Bigamist has more layers. Jordan leaves Harry’s LA home without calling the police. Harry nevertheless confesses to both his wives. In the climactic courtroom scene the judge (John Maxwell) concludes that:
‘If Harry Graham had taken Phyllis Martin as his mistress some people would have winked an eye and turned their head. But because he gave her and the child she bore him his name and an honorable place in the community he must be utterly destroyed. Now, I don’t deny that the defendant should be punished but I do believe that in this case punishment might well be tempered with mercy. … When a man, even with the best intentions, breaks the moral laws we live by, we really don’t need man-made laws to punish him. He’ll find out that the penalty of the court is always the smallest punishment …’
The judge’s words make baldly explicit the moral issues of the story that Lupino has told but this finale is very well played by all concerned. The physical attitudes of the three main characters, and the looks that they exchange in court, sustain The Bigamist’s emotional complexity to what can meaningfully be called the bitter end.
9 August 2023
