UNFAITHFULLY YOURS ***1/2
IDEA: Believing his wife has been unfaithful to him while he was away in England, a supercilious conductor fantasizes about his revenge.
BLURB: As clever, gut-busting, and formally sophisticated as anything else Preston Sturges did, Unfaithfully Yours is also the writer-director’s most scaldingly dark film, a murder comedy that throws acid on the “Great Man” narrative of creative genius. Sturges’ subject is Sir Alfred de Carter, a vaunted orchestra conductor played with brilliantly insufferable haughtiness and irascibility by Rex Harrison. Unfaithfully Yours wastes little time undercutting the illusion of his alleged greatness; suspecting his wife of infidelity on nothing more than a secondhand account from a reviled brother-in-law, the urbane Carter is launched into an emotional tailspin, his doubts compounding into a full-fledged mania of insecure masculinity. It is not his love for putative wife-muse Daphne de Carter that feeds his work, but his misguided hatred for her. Sturges stages the psychic effects of his imagined grievances in an ingeniously structured series of revenge fantasies, all scored to classical music pieces, as Carter’s ideé fixe becomes more pathetically insane. The payoff is a protracted sequence of astonishingly choreographed and timed physical comedy, in which a houseful of domestic objects systematically and hysterically rebel against Carter’s progress, deflating him to a sniveling child on the floor. One wishes Unfaithfully Yours did more for its female characters, who mostly sit on the sidelines as their husbands make fools of themselves. Yet the film’s steel-trap construction and sheer hilarity are often overwhelming, and proof that seeing pompous men fail will always carry a charge of satisfaction.
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