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I want to talk about The Unfaithful (1947) for the sake of its last act, because I didn't see it coming from the first two and I would have hated the film if it hadn't turned up.
I have no quarrel with the premise, which is a nice hook of sunlit, suburban noir. Home three days early from a business trip to Oregon, Bob Hunter (Zachary Scott) pulls up through the broad, palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills to find his front door a mob of reporters, his living room a crowd of cops around a corpse, and his wife Christine (Ann Sheridan), so decisive and affectionate when they spoke on the phone the previous evening, weeping in shock and unable to give a statement even with the support of their mutual friend Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres). Presently she describes a break-in turned violent; she claims no recognition of the man she stabbed fatally with the Japanese knife her husband sent home as a souvenir of his tour in the Pacific and denies the delicately worded suggestion of a sexual motive for the attack. The torn condition of her dress and the blood with which the housemaids found her covered attest to a close-quarters struggle. Throughout the ordeal, her husband behaves as attentively and protectively as one could hope toward his wife of three years, one of the rare marriages made with one foot on the troopship that worked out after the war. The last ten or eleven months since his homecoming have been a catch-up honeymoon. Even a lawyer as professionally cynical as Larry—he specializes in divorces—affirms to the investigating detective, "If I were being questioned, Lieutenant, I would add that you'll go a long way before you meet a couple as happy as these two." We just wonder how long they'll stay that way as an open-and-shut case of self-defense wrinkles inconsistently on closer inspection, such as the identification of the dead man as a local artist with no criminal record and a studio in Laurel Canyon his wife knew nothing about. If they had never met before the night he waited for a woman in furs and jewels to unlock her door before shoving her brusquely through it, why should Michael Tanner have signed his name to a bust of Chris with her hair streaming over her bare shoulders, so painstakingly detailed that the dealer assures a suspicious Larry it was sculpted from life? If, as she reluctantly revises her story, Chris did know the man she killed insofar as she agreed to model for him and then broke off the sittings after his interest in her became blatantly personal, why should she be willing to pay a "blackmailer's price" of $10,000 to secure the sculpture before her husband can see it? Did anyone catch the title of this flick?
Whatever the suspenseful merits of this setup, I am afraid that until the home stretch of its last half-hour The Unfaithful almost entirely succeeded in distracting me with such a wall of unremitting social conservatism that I wondered if I had gotten my genres crossed. Divorce is presented strictly as the pastime of frivolous women like Paula (Eve Arden), Bob's blonde, barbed, cocktail-fueled cousin introduced throwing herself a party to celebrate her divorce decree: "I am now again on the open market. Do I hear any bidders?" Her drunken gate-crasher of an ex-husband is hastily seen home by Chris and Larry, whose dry kibitzing barely camouflages the contempt he feels for his part in helping his sophisticated, shallow clientele evade their marital responsibilities. "I only do the paperwork. The rest I leave to the ladies." An interlude at the offices of Hannaford & Maguire bears him out with its satirical pageant of wifely philanderers who fret, "I can't put off this divorce another minute! I want to give the papers to my daughter for a Christmas present when she comes home from college," or are acidly reminded by a weary Larry, "When a girl sees her own mother get two divorces, she probably thinks it's the thing to do." It's all just a bit così fan tutte, sharpened by the apparent absence of any sympathetic female character beyond Chris. Paula's crowd all cut one another dead over their vodka stingers; unsatisfied by blackmail or the involvement of the police, Mrs. Tanner (Marta Mitrovich) plots her own extrajudicial vengeance against the woman who killed her man, encouraged by her co-conspirator's maxim that "there is nothing more unpredictable than a husband betrayed." The slap a cold, humiliated Bob delivers to his unprotesting wife certainly wasn't foreshadowed by his buildup as husband of the year. But then violence against women is taken so lightly and sardonically for granted in this scenario, it seems to call into question the shock with which we saw Chris rushed by the man who staked out her house until she came home alone, the brutality of their silhouettes struggling behind the curtains as she screamed and furniture toppled and with a final crash the lights went out and the harrowing scene with them. "Every morning you open up the paper," Paula sighs with topical callousness, "there's another body found on a weed-covered lot. Believe me, the day will come when parents will give their daughters brass knuckles instead of a wristwatch for graduation." So all-embracing is the film's chauvinism that scant minutes after matter-of-factly comforting Chris about the state of her marriage, Larry is denouncing her as cruelly as a disillusioned lover himself: "You're no different than all the other cheating, conniving women who parade through my office . . . I've heard the same story in a dozen courtrooms. I know all the shabby tricks and tearful excuses." I was just as disappointed, though not in him alone. For years now, if demanded at the gunpoint of a thought experiment to pick one cinematic genre of the American 1940's and '50's to watch for its female characters, film noir would generally be it. Its women are complicated—chivalrous, compromised, Code-dodging—well beyond the ideal of the house-angel or the specter of the femme fatale. I expected better of the shadows that gave me Kansas Richman, Lucia Bennett, Dr. Silla, and Billie Nash.
Written for the screen by David Goodis and James Gunn, The Unfaithful is widely acknowledged as an uncredited reworking of W. Somerset Maugham's The Letter (1927), which had previously seen two more faithful Hollywood transfers in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels and in 1940 with Bette Davis. While it does preserve the conceit and even some of the surrounding complications of a woman charged with the death of an intruder with whom she is revealed to have far more history than initially disclosed, the version that director Vincent Sherman identified as a "switch" almost exactly reverses the polarity of the revelation: where Leslie Crosbie of The Letter gets away with the cold-blooded murder of her extramarital lover by claiming self-defense during an attempted rape, Chris Hunter really was attacked by the kind of violently possessive ex who refused to accept the end of their adulterous affair, escalating from public scenes to stalking to finally trying to prove his rights on her body, which she was forced to refute with his life. According to the AFI Catalog, the Production Code Administration agreed to approve her transgressions only if Warner Bros. stressed the anti-divorce stance of the picture, responding to the social alarm of the post-war divorce boom. The concession leaves the film weirdly out of focus with itself, but I almost don't care. Independent of the treatment of adultery, it means that a movie cleared for production in 1946 states almost as a matter of course that even the consent of a prior sexual relationship does not sanction a sexual assault. In this respect it may be a stronger statement than The Blue Gardenia (1953), otherwise the more daring and coherent of the two—the protagonist of Lang's film is not acquitted in court of her lover's murder. It doesn't even seem to slip through some kind of moral loophole, as if Tanner were acceptably disposable because of the illicit nature of their relationship. Chris' entire legal defense rests on the principle that regardless of how it started, once the lady is through, buddy, she's through, and if you push your luck and keep pushing, you may have no one but yourself to blame if you run into her knife ten times. As this damned retrograde pendulum keeps swinging, it is all the more important to call attention to the realities of the past that so much conservative myth would overwrite, such as a basic understanding of taking no for an answer.
As for the treatment of adultery, the film does something equally unexpected with it: as soon as the trial starts, it flips, too. The media circus smashes us in montage much as events have overtaken Chris, the headlines of her arrest breaking on news tickers and the radio, the front pages of the Los Angeles Examiner and the Times. The babble of newsboys and reporters gives way to a gleeful, scandalized, titillated stream of vox pop—Women like her think they can get away with anything. It says they had a love nest in Laurel Canyon. Get a load of that Hunter dame! All of a sudden the judgmental sexism the film seems to have been espousing sounds mean and unfair, the high ground only insofar as it provides somewhere to punch down from. Perhaps it doesn't believe after all that for the high crime of falling into an affair she had to fight to get out of, Chris deserves to be blackmailed, slapped, abandoned, sensationally pilloried as the most scarlet woman in California and smeared into fair game for the eager hatred of strangers who pile into the courtroom as if her carefully cool profile were the hottest entertainment since bear-baiting. Ain't the Hunter case exciting? Yeah, I love highbrow murders. The sneering prosecutor who alleges that Chris killed her lover to conceal their affair from her husband has to be interrupted in his Gish gallop of insinuations by Larry, who is handling the defense as a favor to Bob; on redirect, his cross-examination reveals a much lonelier and more ambivalent origin story for the wartime courtship of the Hunters than we were led to imagine, Chris who was on vacation in Los Angeles when she met a handsome G.I. for whom she gave up her career as a fashion editor to wait for two and a half years in a house she had never shared with her husband and try to occupy her time with the Red Cross and the USO. Again and again, the prosecutor leans on the canard that a woman capable of sexual betrayal would hardly scruple at the lesser sin of murder in the first degree. Larry's closing argument is blunter and more humane: "Let me remind you, she is not on trial for infidelity, nor for lying. She is on trial for murder, and of that she is innocent." It can't entirely mitigate the spillover from the Breen-mandated hatchet job on divorce, but it creates a neatly implicating effect, as if we're supposed to have accepted the casual wholesale condemnation of Chris Hunter only to have all our small-minded, slack-jawed misogyny turned back on us in the mirror of the L.A. public. I can't tell you how much better I felt about it.
The clincher is none other than Paula, who with one magnificent broadside comes suddenly clear as a female iteration of the wise and dissolute archetype who so often hangs around the edges of the action in this era, stealing scenes and their audience's hearts. Where Chris met her husband's every injured reproach with self-abasing acquiescence, Paula has no patience with her cousin's masculine self-pity when he comes sniffing around for a boost as the jury deliberates. Larry defended the affair sociologically, as a product of the rupture of the war that divided so many couples for so long. Paula points the finger a little closer to home. "I married her because I loved her," Bob protests the accusation that he only proposed because he was shipping out. His cousin gives him the armor-piercing side-eye of a lady who lunches: "Sure. For two whole weeks. How long was that supposed to last her? What you wanted was a whirl and a memory. You wanted a beautiful woman waiting for you and you didn't want anyone making time with her while you were away, so you hung up a no-trespassing sign like you'd stake a gold claim. You didn't marry her," she finishes with a precision metaphor strike, "you just took an option on her . . . I was there. I saw you making with that uniform and that 'today we live' routine. And then you were off." She doesn't even like Chris, but she isn't going to tear the other woman down for benefit of her cousin's ego, especially not once her bullshit detector correctly pings that too much of his anger is really shame at still loving the woman who cuckolded him. Confronting the pedestal he placed his home-front pin-up of Chris on, Bob asks rather helplessly, "What's a wife supposed to be?" Without missing a beat, Paula shoots back, "A human being—and that's two strikes against anybody." The climactic scene of the picture remains a public service announcement and there's only so much that even Ayres can do to make it sound human, but at least it confirms that the process of defending Chris has sincerely won Larry to her side such that he's the one to brace his old college chum with the news that his wife is leaving him in accordance with his wishes unless he does anything to stop her, like apologize. Personally I don't know that their marriage will survive, but I agree with Larry that they could at least try talking it over instead of divorcing out of guilt and other people's expectations and knee-jerk machismo. We are clearly, with that last lighting of cigarettes, meant to hope.
Despite its value to fans of social history and female-focused noir, The Unfaithful is idiotically difficult to get hold of. I saw it originally on TCM in November and was able to locate it again thanks only to the good offices of the Minuteman Library Network, who have it on out-of-print DVD. More than just a social problem film with a crime as its vehicle, it's an unusual flavor of domestic noir and a telling reminder that period-typical can be a complex adjective. Scott is cleverly cast as the cheated-on husband as opposed to the fatal rake, Sheridan never so docile that we can't believe she used that knife; Ayres' post-war mustache does him no favors, but his voice was made for ironic commentary. The cinematography by Ernest Haller includes some suitably home-furnished shadows along with its location shooting of MacArthur Park, Angels Flight, and everyone's favorite Bradbury Building. I can't do anything about the first two acts, but we'll always have Peach-O-Reno (1931). This whirl brought to you by my innocent backers at Patreon.
I have no quarrel with the premise, which is a nice hook of sunlit, suburban noir. Home three days early from a business trip to Oregon, Bob Hunter (Zachary Scott) pulls up through the broad, palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills to find his front door a mob of reporters, his living room a crowd of cops around a corpse, and his wife Christine (Ann Sheridan), so decisive and affectionate when they spoke on the phone the previous evening, weeping in shock and unable to give a statement even with the support of their mutual friend Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres). Presently she describes a break-in turned violent; she claims no recognition of the man she stabbed fatally with the Japanese knife her husband sent home as a souvenir of his tour in the Pacific and denies the delicately worded suggestion of a sexual motive for the attack. The torn condition of her dress and the blood with which the housemaids found her covered attest to a close-quarters struggle. Throughout the ordeal, her husband behaves as attentively and protectively as one could hope toward his wife of three years, one of the rare marriages made with one foot on the troopship that worked out after the war. The last ten or eleven months since his homecoming have been a catch-up honeymoon. Even a lawyer as professionally cynical as Larry—he specializes in divorces—affirms to the investigating detective, "If I were being questioned, Lieutenant, I would add that you'll go a long way before you meet a couple as happy as these two." We just wonder how long they'll stay that way as an open-and-shut case of self-defense wrinkles inconsistently on closer inspection, such as the identification of the dead man as a local artist with no criminal record and a studio in Laurel Canyon his wife knew nothing about. If they had never met before the night he waited for a woman in furs and jewels to unlock her door before shoving her brusquely through it, why should Michael Tanner have signed his name to a bust of Chris with her hair streaming over her bare shoulders, so painstakingly detailed that the dealer assures a suspicious Larry it was sculpted from life? If, as she reluctantly revises her story, Chris did know the man she killed insofar as she agreed to model for him and then broke off the sittings after his interest in her became blatantly personal, why should she be willing to pay a "blackmailer's price" of $10,000 to secure the sculpture before her husband can see it? Did anyone catch the title of this flick?
Whatever the suspenseful merits of this setup, I am afraid that until the home stretch of its last half-hour The Unfaithful almost entirely succeeded in distracting me with such a wall of unremitting social conservatism that I wondered if I had gotten my genres crossed. Divorce is presented strictly as the pastime of frivolous women like Paula (Eve Arden), Bob's blonde, barbed, cocktail-fueled cousin introduced throwing herself a party to celebrate her divorce decree: "I am now again on the open market. Do I hear any bidders?" Her drunken gate-crasher of an ex-husband is hastily seen home by Chris and Larry, whose dry kibitzing barely camouflages the contempt he feels for his part in helping his sophisticated, shallow clientele evade their marital responsibilities. "I only do the paperwork. The rest I leave to the ladies." An interlude at the offices of Hannaford & Maguire bears him out with its satirical pageant of wifely philanderers who fret, "I can't put off this divorce another minute! I want to give the papers to my daughter for a Christmas present when she comes home from college," or are acidly reminded by a weary Larry, "When a girl sees her own mother get two divorces, she probably thinks it's the thing to do." It's all just a bit così fan tutte, sharpened by the apparent absence of any sympathetic female character beyond Chris. Paula's crowd all cut one another dead over their vodka stingers; unsatisfied by blackmail or the involvement of the police, Mrs. Tanner (Marta Mitrovich) plots her own extrajudicial vengeance against the woman who killed her man, encouraged by her co-conspirator's maxim that "there is nothing more unpredictable than a husband betrayed." The slap a cold, humiliated Bob delivers to his unprotesting wife certainly wasn't foreshadowed by his buildup as husband of the year. But then violence against women is taken so lightly and sardonically for granted in this scenario, it seems to call into question the shock with which we saw Chris rushed by the man who staked out her house until she came home alone, the brutality of their silhouettes struggling behind the curtains as she screamed and furniture toppled and with a final crash the lights went out and the harrowing scene with them. "Every morning you open up the paper," Paula sighs with topical callousness, "there's another body found on a weed-covered lot. Believe me, the day will come when parents will give their daughters brass knuckles instead of a wristwatch for graduation." So all-embracing is the film's chauvinism that scant minutes after matter-of-factly comforting Chris about the state of her marriage, Larry is denouncing her as cruelly as a disillusioned lover himself: "You're no different than all the other cheating, conniving women who parade through my office . . . I've heard the same story in a dozen courtrooms. I know all the shabby tricks and tearful excuses." I was just as disappointed, though not in him alone. For years now, if demanded at the gunpoint of a thought experiment to pick one cinematic genre of the American 1940's and '50's to watch for its female characters, film noir would generally be it. Its women are complicated—chivalrous, compromised, Code-dodging—well beyond the ideal of the house-angel or the specter of the femme fatale. I expected better of the shadows that gave me Kansas Richman, Lucia Bennett, Dr. Silla, and Billie Nash.
Written for the screen by David Goodis and James Gunn, The Unfaithful is widely acknowledged as an uncredited reworking of W. Somerset Maugham's The Letter (1927), which had previously seen two more faithful Hollywood transfers in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels and in 1940 with Bette Davis. While it does preserve the conceit and even some of the surrounding complications of a woman charged with the death of an intruder with whom she is revealed to have far more history than initially disclosed, the version that director Vincent Sherman identified as a "switch" almost exactly reverses the polarity of the revelation: where Leslie Crosbie of The Letter gets away with the cold-blooded murder of her extramarital lover by claiming self-defense during an attempted rape, Chris Hunter really was attacked by the kind of violently possessive ex who refused to accept the end of their adulterous affair, escalating from public scenes to stalking to finally trying to prove his rights on her body, which she was forced to refute with his life. According to the AFI Catalog, the Production Code Administration agreed to approve her transgressions only if Warner Bros. stressed the anti-divorce stance of the picture, responding to the social alarm of the post-war divorce boom. The concession leaves the film weirdly out of focus with itself, but I almost don't care. Independent of the treatment of adultery, it means that a movie cleared for production in 1946 states almost as a matter of course that even the consent of a prior sexual relationship does not sanction a sexual assault. In this respect it may be a stronger statement than The Blue Gardenia (1953), otherwise the more daring and coherent of the two—the protagonist of Lang's film is not acquitted in court of her lover's murder. It doesn't even seem to slip through some kind of moral loophole, as if Tanner were acceptably disposable because of the illicit nature of their relationship. Chris' entire legal defense rests on the principle that regardless of how it started, once the lady is through, buddy, she's through, and if you push your luck and keep pushing, you may have no one but yourself to blame if you run into her knife ten times. As this damned retrograde pendulum keeps swinging, it is all the more important to call attention to the realities of the past that so much conservative myth would overwrite, such as a basic understanding of taking no for an answer.
As for the treatment of adultery, the film does something equally unexpected with it: as soon as the trial starts, it flips, too. The media circus smashes us in montage much as events have overtaken Chris, the headlines of her arrest breaking on news tickers and the radio, the front pages of the Los Angeles Examiner and the Times. The babble of newsboys and reporters gives way to a gleeful, scandalized, titillated stream of vox pop—Women like her think they can get away with anything. It says they had a love nest in Laurel Canyon. Get a load of that Hunter dame! All of a sudden the judgmental sexism the film seems to have been espousing sounds mean and unfair, the high ground only insofar as it provides somewhere to punch down from. Perhaps it doesn't believe after all that for the high crime of falling into an affair she had to fight to get out of, Chris deserves to be blackmailed, slapped, abandoned, sensationally pilloried as the most scarlet woman in California and smeared into fair game for the eager hatred of strangers who pile into the courtroom as if her carefully cool profile were the hottest entertainment since bear-baiting. Ain't the Hunter case exciting? Yeah, I love highbrow murders. The sneering prosecutor who alleges that Chris killed her lover to conceal their affair from her husband has to be interrupted in his Gish gallop of insinuations by Larry, who is handling the defense as a favor to Bob; on redirect, his cross-examination reveals a much lonelier and more ambivalent origin story for the wartime courtship of the Hunters than we were led to imagine, Chris who was on vacation in Los Angeles when she met a handsome G.I. for whom she gave up her career as a fashion editor to wait for two and a half years in a house she had never shared with her husband and try to occupy her time with the Red Cross and the USO. Again and again, the prosecutor leans on the canard that a woman capable of sexual betrayal would hardly scruple at the lesser sin of murder in the first degree. Larry's closing argument is blunter and more humane: "Let me remind you, she is not on trial for infidelity, nor for lying. She is on trial for murder, and of that she is innocent." It can't entirely mitigate the spillover from the Breen-mandated hatchet job on divorce, but it creates a neatly implicating effect, as if we're supposed to have accepted the casual wholesale condemnation of Chris Hunter only to have all our small-minded, slack-jawed misogyny turned back on us in the mirror of the L.A. public. I can't tell you how much better I felt about it.
The clincher is none other than Paula, who with one magnificent broadside comes suddenly clear as a female iteration of the wise and dissolute archetype who so often hangs around the edges of the action in this era, stealing scenes and their audience's hearts. Where Chris met her husband's every injured reproach with self-abasing acquiescence, Paula has no patience with her cousin's masculine self-pity when he comes sniffing around for a boost as the jury deliberates. Larry defended the affair sociologically, as a product of the rupture of the war that divided so many couples for so long. Paula points the finger a little closer to home. "I married her because I loved her," Bob protests the accusation that he only proposed because he was shipping out. His cousin gives him the armor-piercing side-eye of a lady who lunches: "Sure. For two whole weeks. How long was that supposed to last her? What you wanted was a whirl and a memory. You wanted a beautiful woman waiting for you and you didn't want anyone making time with her while you were away, so you hung up a no-trespassing sign like you'd stake a gold claim. You didn't marry her," she finishes with a precision metaphor strike, "you just took an option on her . . . I was there. I saw you making with that uniform and that 'today we live' routine. And then you were off." She doesn't even like Chris, but she isn't going to tear the other woman down for benefit of her cousin's ego, especially not once her bullshit detector correctly pings that too much of his anger is really shame at still loving the woman who cuckolded him. Confronting the pedestal he placed his home-front pin-up of Chris on, Bob asks rather helplessly, "What's a wife supposed to be?" Without missing a beat, Paula shoots back, "A human being—and that's two strikes against anybody." The climactic scene of the picture remains a public service announcement and there's only so much that even Ayres can do to make it sound human, but at least it confirms that the process of defending Chris has sincerely won Larry to her side such that he's the one to brace his old college chum with the news that his wife is leaving him in accordance with his wishes unless he does anything to stop her, like apologize. Personally I don't know that their marriage will survive, but I agree with Larry that they could at least try talking it over instead of divorcing out of guilt and other people's expectations and knee-jerk machismo. We are clearly, with that last lighting of cigarettes, meant to hope.
Despite its value to fans of social history and female-focused noir, The Unfaithful is idiotically difficult to get hold of. I saw it originally on TCM in November and was able to locate it again thanks only to the good offices of the Minuteman Library Network, who have it on out-of-print DVD. More than just a social problem film with a crime as its vehicle, it's an unusual flavor of domestic noir and a telling reminder that period-typical can be a complex adjective. Scott is cleverly cast as the cheated-on husband as opposed to the fatal rake, Sheridan never so docile that we can't believe she used that knife; Ayres' post-war mustache does him no favors, but his voice was made for ironic commentary. The cinematography by Ernest Haller includes some suitably home-furnished shadows along with its location shooting of MacArthur Park, Angels Flight, and everyone's favorite Bradbury Building. I can't do anything about the first two acts, but we'll always have Peach-O-Reno (1931). This whirl brought to you by my innocent backers at Patreon.
*
Re: *
I appreciate it so much when the past throws things like this up at me, whatever bargains they had to make to get here. They're still real.
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You're welcome! It took forever to get to the good stuff, but then it was actually good.
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I didn't, either, until I tried to find it again! I had sort of assumed it would be on one of the grainier free channels of the Roku at least. It isn't streaming even for pay.
My local KCOP-3 Movies channel kept showing it for awhile, so I'd seen it a couple of times before TCM aired it. That Eve Arden scene packs such a satisfying wallop. (The night TCM showed it, people kept tweeting: "Drag him, Paula!" and the like.)
That's delightful (and deserved). She's the film's eleven o'clock secret weapon. I suppose she and Chris don't like one another well enough to run off together, alas.
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I admire this comment deeply.
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Gorgeous review!
Ah, a perfect line.
My local last-of-the-video-stores doesn't seem to have this one, though they have a lot of noir. They do have something called Unfaithfully Yours from the subsequent year, but it sounds ghastly.
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Thank you!
My local last-of-the-video-stores doesn't seem to have this one, though they have a lot of noir.
Well, if you see Desert Fury (1947) before I do, please report back. It is supposed to be jaw-droppingly queer.
(I desperately want to see Desert Fury. It came to the Criterion Channel in a bundle of Technicolor noir last July and left at the end of September, thus falling squarely within the stretch when I was living with my parents, without my Linux-driven pseudo-TV, and had in any case almost entirely lost the ability to watch movies and TV, which would not really revive until, arguably, this year. I'm bitter about it.)
They do have something called Unfaithfully Yours from the subsequent year, but it sounds ghastly.
I've never heard of it! And now that I've looked it up, I don't want to!
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It's mixed up with a lot of divorce statistics and championing of marriage, but some of Larry's straight talk to Chris and Bob is completely reasonable and that was one of my favorite pieces: it's just good, generally applicable advice.