Preston Sturges (1948)
It proved to be what it promised to be – a curate’s egg. I was looking forward to seeing another Preston Sturges film. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing another film starring Rex Harrison. He does turn out to be the main problem with Unfaithfully Yours but he’s not all that’s wrong with this formally imaginative, thematically daring, persistently unpleasant comedy – generally regarded as the last significant movie that Sturges made.
The internationally renowned orchestral conductor Sir Alfred de Carter Bt (Harrison) arrives back in America after visiting his native England. Before leaving, he had asked his brother-in-law August Henshler (Rudy Vallée) to ‘keep an eye’ on Alfred’s much younger wife Daphne (Linda Darnell). He meant a mildly protective rather than a suspiciously watchful eye but literal-minded August misinterpreted the request. At his New York home, Alfred learns that his brother-in-law hired a private detective to monitor Daphne’s movements. The furious Alfred’s first reaction is to tear a strip off August and tear up the detective’s report but its tenacious author, Mr Sweeney (Edgar Kennedy), reassembles the document. Sweeney informs Alfred that Daphne was seen late at night entering the hotel room of Tony Windborn (Kurt Kreuger), Alfred’s secretary. She didn’t emerge until thirty-eight minutes later. Tony is conspicuously good-looking and much closer to Daphne’s age. Now suspicious, Alfred picks a quarrel with his wife – his barbs leave her hurt and puzzled. They set out to the concert hall where Alfred is appearing that evening and where the central action of Unfaithfully Yours gets underway.
All that action takes place in Alfred’s mind, while he’s conducting the orchestra, and Sturges makes this pretty clear. The camera zooms into an extreme close-up of Rex Harrison’s left eye (in which he was only partially sighted, thanks to measles in childhood), and doesn’t seem to stop – a signal that we’re going inside Alfred’s head. But what follows is extended and absorbing enough to make us forget and suppose that the events on the screen, which we watch with growing unease and eventual horror, are really happening. The episode climaxes in Alfred killing Daphne for her assumed infidelity – after cleverly arranging to frame Tony for her murder. When Sturges then cuts back to the concert performance, he achieves his own coup de théâtre. The music is the overture to Rossini’s opera Semiramide, whose title character is a femme fatale.
This is the first of three such sections: each announced by the zoom into the conductor’s eye; each describing a different kind of imagined revenge; each form of revenge inspired and intermittently accompanied by apt music that Alfred’s orchestra is playing. In the second episode, he accepts that Daphne loves another and writes her a handsome cheque – to the strains of the Tannhäuser overture: Wagner’s opera concerns the struggle between sacred and profane love, and redemption through the higher form. In the third episode, Alfred insists that he, Daphne and Tony play Russian roulette. When terrified, weeping Tony can’t pull the trigger, Alfred contemptuously demonstrates how it should be done, shooting himself through the head. The music is Tchaikovsky’s tone poem Francesca da Rimini, named for a character in Dante’s Inferno who, with her lover, is condemned to Hell for adultery. Having played his surprise hand at the end of the first revenge, Sturges can’t, of course, devote as much screen time to the subsequent two but he has another trick up his sleeve. As the audience applauds at the end of the concert, Alfred storms out. Back in his and Daphne’s apartment, he embarks on a vigorous but ineptly muddled attempt to get his own back, drawing on each of the three revenge options.
Unfaithfully Noir isn’t just a black comedy – it’s atmospherically a noir comedy too, particularly in the deeply shadowed lighting (by Victor Milner) in the scenes of Alfred’s murderous retribution. It’s hard not to admire the inventiveness of Sturges’s plot structure yet I didn’t find the film very funny – for three reasons. First, once you get the hang of the bold conception, even the relatively brief cheque-writing and Russian roulette sequences overstay their welcome. Second, the elaborate, ingenious slapstick of Alfred really trying to take revenge soon feels like a self-conscious attempt at classic physical comedy. You soon realise too it’ll go on for some time – and prepare yourself for the long haul. Third, Rex Harrison.
This screening at BFI (part of the Pauline Kael centenary season) was introduced by Kate Stables, who was an invigorating surprise. Enthusiastic, informative and very well prepared, she talked more impressively than she usually writes for Sight & Sound: Stables really made you eager to see the film. She also mentioned, however, that Sturges’s first choice for the role of Sir Alfred had been James Mason – that made watching Rex Harrison all the more disagreeable. It would have been different for audiences in 1948 (such as they were: the film was a commercial flop) but Harrison’s Alfred, at this distance in time, inescapably anticipates his most famous screen (and stage) performance, as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. Like Higgins, Alfred is a gifted, childish egomaniac (albeit a more obviously alarming one). If a performer has the reputation of a rotter in real life, I normally try to ignore it but I find this impossible with Rex Harrison. Alfred’s egomania seems an expression of the actor playing him.
Harrison’s delivery is expert if not richly varied. He shows plenty of skill in the marathon slapstick sequence. Tall and very slim, he cuts an amusing, almost cartoon-like figure, especially in his energetic conducting of the orchestra. He makes Alfred’s exasperation funny occasionally – as in the last exchange with Daphne, leading to their reconciliation, during which she insists she knows very well what Russian roulette is because she and her father often played it together. (She’s mixing it up with the card game Russian Bank.) But the showoff quality in Harrison’s acting is ever-present. Since the leading man has nearly all the witty, acerbic lines here, the showing off is even hard to ignore. The rest of the cast (which also includes Lionel Stander) is perfectly adequate but, compared with other Sturges films, this is nearly a one-man show. Alfred comes across as smart, arrogant and nasty.
Yet this may well be what Sturges intended. The apparent inspiration for the character was the British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham (still alive when the film appeared). As Kate Stables noted, Beecham was the grandson of his namesake, inventor of the laxative Beecham’s Pills; Sir Alfred de Carter shares (most of) his surname with the man who patented Carter’s Little Liver Pills in the US. In 1943, Beecham divorced his second wife to marry a concert pianist twenty-nine years his junior. But as Stables also pointed out, the protagonist is a piece of self-criticism too. Although he wrote the first draft script for what became Unfaithfully Yours in the early 1930s, the film went into production just after Sturges’s third marriage had ended; three years later, he would marry for the fourth and last time, to a woman thirty years younger than him.
In the film’s finale, Alfred, having virtually destroyed their apartment, learns the innocent explanation of Daphne’s late-night visit to Tony’s room and its duration. August had phoned Daphne to ask if she knew the whereabouts of his wife Barbara (Barbara Lawrence). Knowing how fed up her sister was of the boring August, Daphne feared she might find Barbara with Tony. The door to his room was unlocked but there was no one inside. Daphne looked through the keyhole as she prepared to leave and saw a man in the corridor. She thought she’d better stay put until he went away, which he did, thirty-eight minutes later. The man answers to Alfred’s description of the detective Sweeney (‘A large lumpy man with a face like an orang-utan?’) When Alfred begs Daphne to forgive him for doubting her, she readily agrees:
‘I know what it’s like to be a great man. That is, I don’t really, but… having so many responsibilities and… so much tenseness… watching out for and protecting so many people …’
Love is blind: Alfred doesn’t watch out for anyone but Alfred. Writing these ironic lines, Preston Sturges may have had himself in mind but when a film director indulges in self-censure, for being an egocentric artist, that can induce a sort of blindness too. He may want what he sees as his odious qualities realised on the screen to the exclusion of others. That’s certainly what Sturges gets from Rex Harrison, who so dominates proceedings. For viewers with less personal investment in the story, though, the lack of leavening charm and vulnerability in Harrison’s portrait is a serious deficit – and makes one long for an actor like James Mason. You can imagine what – and how much more – he’d have made of Sir Alfred’s horror of being cuckolded or of the second revenge, when he writes the cheque. Mason would have got across the character’s comically conflicted feelings. Rex Harrison in this scene just looks and sounds sarcastic.
12 June 2019
