• Unfaithfully Yours

10/5/23 (Thurs)

Unfunnily Yours is more like it. Preston Sturges’ 1948 film was apparently his last critical success after a string of flops, though it was a commercial failure at the time. That was partly due to the untimely suicide of Rex Harrison’s real-life suffering mistress, which creepily paralleled one of the plot points, and the studio didn’t help things by shifting strategy and advertising the black comedy as a thriller. It’s been reevaluated since and appears on many lists of best-ever comedies; it’s one of Tarantino’s 11 favorite films. Not on mine.

The concept is fun. A famous conductor (Harrison at his bristly best) preparing for a major concert becomes convinced Othello-like on flimsy evidence that his wife (Linda Darnell) is cheating on him. As he takes the podium, he is unable to clear his mind of doubts, and he conducts three pieces (Rossini, Wagner, Tchaikovsky) while at the same time imagining each as a different scenario for dealing with the situation, ranging from outright murder to Russian roulette. In the end, he discovers that his wife, who had no idea that she was even under suspicion, was completely innocent, and he returns to his normal irascible self.

The joke is that each of the imagined scenarios reflects the pieces that Harrison was conducting, which is an interesting inside joke for classical music buffs; I only knew about it from Wikipedia. The Rossini opera, for instance, was evidently about a femme fatale, and that is how Darnell appears in the conductor’s dream during the overture, where he takes a knife and slashes her to death before framing her supposed lover for the crime. The Wagner excerpt is about the renunciation of love for a more spiritual goal, to which Harrison dreams of meek acceptance and forgiveness, and the final piece is about an adulterous wife, prompting a dream of Russian roulette (in which he ends up getting the bullet). When he finishes the concert, he tries carrying out each of these scenarios in reality but flubs each in turn. His efforts become slapstick and desperate, like his foot falling through the wicker chair seat, which might have been funny 75 years ago. The first of the dreams is especially overdone in both tone and length as he creates a recording to throw the police off among other actions, creating an imbalance with the rest. It quickly wore out its welcome.

The film was buoyed by a strong performance by Harrison at his most lovably petulant. He made much of his Englishness in this very American story. I can see where audiences might have blanched at the glee with which he murders his wife given the suicide scandal hanging over him, but he commendably gives it his all. Bennett was fine as the wife, and others were well cast. The dialogue was nothing special, though a few gems find their way in (“You handle Handel like nobody handles Handel”).

Comedy is probably the film genre that gets old the fastest, and this is a good example.