Unfaithfully Yours

 Audiences in 1948, the year Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours was released, didn't much like the movie and seem to have been confused and disturbed by the picture.  These reactions are rational.  Unfaithfully Yours is an uncompromising depiction of sexual jealousy on the order of Othello.  In fact, the movie is a little like Othello if the story were acted by Abbott and Costello or the Three Stooges.  The film is a bizarre combination of quasi-Elizabethan rhetoric, Sturges' fantastically complex and intricate dialogue and speechifying, delivered at a high-speed in rapid-fire bursts of epigrams and metaphysical tropes, and the most primitive, brutal slapstick.  People are slipping on banana peels while uttering spectacularly incisive and elaborate speeches  Furthermore, the film's narrative, featuring three equally morbid responses to a woman's alleged infidelity -- murder, masochistic degradation, and suicide -- is pretty problematic in something that purports to be light entertainment.  Despite these characteristics, or, indeed, precisely because of them, Unfaithfully Yours is a masterpiece and, certainly, well worth watching and, indeed, studying.  

Rex Harrison plays Sir Alfred, a world-famous orchestral conductor.  (Harrison was famous for his performances in plays by George Bernard Shaw and he is one of the few actors capable of successfully speaking at high velocity the exceedingly elaborate, unnatural, and metaphorical dialogue that Sturges writes for this part.)  At the film's outset, we are introduced to the principal characters, Harrison's wife played by Linda Darnell, her sister and millionaire husband Henschler (Rudy Vallee), Harrison's handsome male secretary, Tony, and Sir Alfred's gruff and rather vulgar agent, a Russian named Hugo Standoff.  Sir Alfred's plane, returning from Europe, is astray in the fog over Nova Scotia and feared lost and Sturges (who produced, wrote, and directed the film) shows us how these characters react to this crisis.  The motif of fog obscuring the plane is a symbol for the general fog of sexual jealousy that benights Sir Alfred as the movie progresses.  Sir Alfred is fantastically devoted to his younger wife (he seems to be about 45 and she is, perhaps, 28) and their mutual passion embarrasses onlookers.  We see Alfred in bed with his wife in a startlingly erotic sequence (everyone is dressed, more or less, which only makes things more suggestive) and, then, watch him rehearsing with the orchestra.  Alfred is an appealingly unpretentious artist.  He says that great music should be enjoyed with a sandwich in hand, a bottle of beer, and a bevy of beautiful girls in attendance.  The serpent in this paradise is Alfred's millionaire brother who claims to have put a "tail" (or a detective) on Alfred's wife when the conductor told her to "keep an eye on her."  Taking this too literally, the millionaire has commissioned an "operator's" report seemingly documenting an instance of adultery committed with Alfred's secretary, Tony.  Alfred dismisses the report with contempt and tears it up, depositing the ripped paper in a bucket which he then kicks down the hall of the Manhattan hotel where he and his wife live.  The house dick, finding the bucket and shredded paper, glues the letter back together and delivers it to Alfred.  Alfred, offended, lights the report on fire and almost burns down the hotel -- the fire scene is a masterpiece of brilliantly conceived slapstick, extremely funny and frightening at the same time.  Later, Alfred goes to the private eye's office to denounce the man.  He delivers a scathing rebuke to the man in the office who turns out to be an inoffensive Jewish tailor who is "keeping an eye out" on the office while the detective is at lunch.  When the private dick returns, Alfred contemptuously harangues him as well, but learns enough to suspect that his wife has been unfaithful with Tony.  (The private eye delivers a moving speech about how it's really best not to know what women do when we're not with them and that we should be grateful for any crumbs that they drop our way.)  Tony gives the detective two tickets for the show -- the man is surprisingly a music lover -- and goes home to get ready for the concert.  He mistreats his wife who is puzzled by his weird behavior.  

The famous centerpiece of the film is the concert.  Alfred conducts three pieces, Rossini's overture to Semiramide, Wagner's overture to Tannhauser, and Tchaikovsky's tone-poem, Francesca da Rimini.  During the Rossini overture, he fantasizes an elaborate scheme in which he frames Tony for his murder (by straight razor) of his wife -- he has recorded his voice and screams for help implicating Tony on a home-recording device, an elaborate machine that cuts grooves into a blank vinyl record.  This sequence, involving Linda Darnell's death by slashing, has some of the cruel intensity of Hitchcock and it's alarming.  During the Wagner overture, Alfred imagines nobly forgiving his wife, while magnanimously writing her a check for $100,000.  In the Tchaikovsky fantasy, Alfred demands that Tony play with him a "little game invented by Tsarist officers" (that is, "Russian Roulette") and, when Tony refuses, Alfred blows out his own brains.  The concert, directed under the influence of these melodramatic passions is an enormous success:  the Jewish tailor is moved to tears and the private eye applauds deliriously.  Alfred rushes to his apartment to implement his murder fantasy -- but he can't get the recording device to work and ends up just cutting his thumb badly on the straight razor blade.  (His wife has to bandage up his thumb).  Then, he plans to write her a check for one-hundred thousand but the ink simply spills all over his check and makes a mess of everything.  Alfred's attempt at Russian roulette fails because he can't find the bullets for his revolver.  Of course, it turns out his jealousy was based on a misunderstanding.  Alfred has to talk himself out of this mess and, of course, Preston Sturges, who could talk himself out of anything, obliges with a spectacular speech that ends "a thousand poets dreamed a thousand years and then you were born."  With those lines, and no other apologies needed (although the hero seriously plotted to slash his wife to death), the film ends.

The movie is effective on every level.  The musical pieces are perfectly selected to underline the film's perverse meanings -- the Rossini "gallop" proceeds in a brilliant manner to underscore Alfred's frenzy in implementing the wildly implausible and complicated murder and frame-up.  And, later, the same ever-accelerating "gallop" returns when Sir Alfred literally destroys his entire apartment trying to locate and, then, use the heavy home recording device, stored in an inaccessible upper cabinet.  (The cabinets are full of weird sculpted head in sets of two and three and other peculiar stuff.)  When the recording is made, Alfred struggles mightily with the device "so simple it operates itself" as a slogan says on the machine's operator's manual -- we get glimpses of the instructions written in impenetrable jargon and a diagram that is covered with minute images that are completely illegible. Alfred  has developed an explosive sneeze.  Alfred's recording is made incorrectly and when he plays it for his wife it is about three octaves too low and slow, echoing, in a way, the great joke in The Miracle of Morgan's Creek in which the heroine voice synchs a basso profundo version of "Asleep in the Deep."  (The wife remarks at one point that it sounds "like a dog is talking.")  The Wagner perfectly accompanies Alfred's inept attempts at writing a check.  And the Tchaikovsky flamboyantly sounds as Alfred searches for bullet with which to load the revolver.  The film amplifies and illumines the gulf between fantasy and reality -- we imagine all sorts of savage, noble, and violent acts but it's a lot harder than we expect to put these schemes into actual practice.  The movie makes an interesting and profound point about the relationship between violent or masochistic fantasy and great art -- Sir Alfred's conducting becomes majestic under the influence of his feral imagination and this, in turn, casts a jaundiced light on the composers featured in the film and their works.  In some ways, the film is as sophisticated about classical music as Tar -- Sir Alfred tells his orchestra in rehearsal to play a part marked pizzicato con molto "like a dentist chipping out an old filling."  The film's details are all telling and convincingly organized into the plot -- the script is almost too brilliant (it has an elaborately finished and show-offy veneer and logic).   For instance, a seductive "purple dress with plumes at the hips" figures importantly in the action and dialogue.  The slapstick sequences, wildly discordant with respect to the plot teetering on the edge of tragedy, are among the most brilliantly choreographed in the history of cinema.  There is no other film by Preston Sturges' that so remarkably displays the director's unique gift of combining the most elaborate heights of diction and oratory with the most fundamentally, even savagely primitive, cruelties of slapstick comedy.