Preston Sturges 1948 USA
Starring: Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallée, Kurt Kreuger, Barbara Lawrence, Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy
Of the many influences behind Wes Anderson's recent The Grand Budapest Hotel the masterful screwball comedies of Ernst Lubitsch are perhaps the biggest inspiration but while Lubitsch is often thought of as the king of that genre the writer/director/producer Preston Sturges has to be considered alongside him. Perhaps even more than Lubitsch Sturges was known for his fast-talking dialogue and if ever you were looking for a model illustration the opening minutes of his 1948 Unfaithfully Yours would be as good an example as any other but the film falters soon afterwards and, while overall it has failings in several sectors (it was thought to be the film that effectively ended Sturges' mainstream career), a lot of the blame has to be handed to its star Rex Harrison. There's no doubt that Harrison's patent mix of arrogance and aggression fits well with Sturges' spiky banter and the scene featuring him spitting verbal vitriol as he waves a flaming collection of papers in a detective's face is a delight to see but unfortunately it leaves him woefully deficient in terms of being a relatable character. This wouldn't matter if he were the villain or just a supporting player but he's on screen for 90% of the film and, for at least half of that period, he's an apparently cuckolded husband. Yet it's incredibly hard to feel any sympathy for him, in fact you sort of wonder why it's taken his wife (a decent Linda Darnell, given very little to work with) so long to find another man. In his defence it's pretty obvious that he genuinely does love her but his sheer level of officious conceit and the glee with which he goes about plotting his brutal retribution means you actually end up rooting for her as despite being the wounded party Harrison's Sir Alfred has nothing of the restless nerves of say Ray Milland in Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder, a film Unfaithfully Yours shares a subject with even if they approach it in different ways. It's at this point however that Sturges throws in an uncommon (and for the era forward thinking) premise by rewinding the narrative and allowing us alternative visions of the events where Alfred exchanges his rancour first for noble understanding then for a forced game of Russian Roulette handing us a small amount of suspense as we try and work out which route he's going to take. Such darkness isn't an original thing in the screwball world - The Shop Around The Corner (Lubitsch again) for example dabbled in a suicidal sub-plot - but it still startles to see the leading man of what's billed as a comedy hacking at people with razors and barely managing to hide his smile behind false trauma. The same goes for the conversation between Alfred and a starstruck private detective (a brilliant Edgar Kennedy) when the latter admits that he wishes he'd ignored his own wife's infidelity because he may have had several more days, months or even years of being in love instead of his lonely current life as a divorcee. It's a quietly bleak moment that really didn't need to be there but that very nearly steals the film. Regrettably Sturges wastes these flourishes via an ill-fitting descent into (very poor) slapstick and seems genuinely unsure of whether he's aiming for drama or tomfoolery. It's a point that's only further compounded by Harrison whose general unwillingness to look silly really negates any effect his pratfalls may have. During the thirties and forties Sturges wrote, directed and produced a number of sparkling works, not least the stunning The Lady Eve, but this isn't one of them, ending up just too uneven and lazily made to be anything special. It does have its good points but in general you'd be much better off watching Eve or Sullivan's Travels.
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