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.
( Do you think a woman can make a career out of looking at a picture? )
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.
( Do you think a woman can make a career out of looking at a picture? )
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.
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